RE: Introducing the Service Oriented Architectural style, and it's constraints and properties.

There are certainly many definitions of SOA in literature, and many instantiations in industry.  Gartner has published a case study of a famous SOA deployment at Credit Suisse that spans 680 services from mainframe to desktop (and yes it's CORBA based).  

One of the things we learned from that experience is that there are many types of services -- at a minimum it seems useful to distiguish between "system" level services that provide a kind of  infrastructure service like naming, security, or transaction management that all applications can use, and "application" level services that are specific to a given application. 

I'd agree the definition of SOA that we use needs to be technology neutral, just as REST can be defined independently of HTTP.  But I also have to say there's nothing in a technology neutral definition of SOA that requires it to be stateless, although that is probably good practice. 

I like Dave's suggestion.  I've already taken a small stab at it in the refactored document draft circulated a week or so ago, if anyone wants to read that and comment, that would be great.

Eric



-----Original Message-----
From: Katia Sycara [mailto:katia@cs.cmu.edu]
Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2003 12:29 PM
To: Walden Mathews; dorchard@bea
Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: RE: Introducing the Service Oriented Architectural style, and
it's constraints and properties.



+1
 --Katia

-----Original Message-----
From: www-ws-arch-request@w3.org [mailto:www-ws-arch-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Walden Mathews
Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2003 11:06 AM
To: dorchard@bea
Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Re: Introducing the Service Oriented Architectural style, and
it's constraints and properties.



Dave,

> Architecture Style
> In addition to the styles described in chapter 4 of Dr. Fielding's thesis,
> and the REST style introduced in Chapter 5, this document introduces
> "Service Oriented Architecture".  SOA's are described regularly in
> literature.  This document will describe SOA in relation to Dr. Fielding's
> thesis.

I don't get the gist of SOA, even after having read some of the online
material on it.  I guess what I'm missing is some critical distinctions
from other forms of goodness in distributed computing.  Since the above
proposed text makes heavy use of "SOA", and claims that it is
regularly described in literature, I'd like to propose that a small number
of
high quality references be included in the text.  Google turns up almost
6,000
results for "Service Oriented Architecture".

Does the architecture document already contain such references?
Sorry if I missed them.

Thanks,

Walden

Received on Saturday, 15 February 2003 16:14:05 UTC