Common characteristics of contemporary SOA

Numerous recent and ongoing industry trends and developments have shaped the real world look of SOA. Its founding principles remain , but many have been expanded primarily because the opportunity to do so has been readily acted upon.

Major software vendors are continually conceiving new Web services specifications and building increasingly powerful XML and Web services support into current technologyplatforms. The result is an extended variation of service-oriented architecture we refer to as contemporary SOA .

Contemporary SOA builds upon the primitive SOA model by leveraging industry andtechnology advancements to further its original ideals. Though the required implementation technology can vary, contemporary SOAs have evolved to a point where they can be associated with a set of common characteristics.

Specifically , we explore the following primary characteristics:

• Contemporary SOA is at the core of the service-oriented computing platform.
• Contemporary SOA increases quality of service.
• Contemporary SOA is fundamentally autonomous.
• Contemporary SOA is based on open standards.
• Contemporary SOA supports vendor diversity.
• Contemporary SOA fosters intrinsic interoperability.
• Contemporary SOA promotes discovery.
• Contemporary SOA promotes federation.
• Contemporary SOA promotes architectural composability.
• Contemporary SOA fosters inherent reusability.
• Contemporary SOA emphasizes extensibility.
• Contemporary SOA supports a service-oriented business modeling paradigm.
• Contemporary SOA implements layers of abstraction.
• Contemporary SOA promotes loose coupling throughout the enterprise.
• Contemporary SOA promotes organizational agility.
• Contemporary SOA is a building block.
• Contemporary SOA is an evolution.
• Contemporary SOA is still maturing.
• Contemporary SOA is an achievable ideal.

Note the absence of traditional architectural qualities such as "secure," "transactional," "reliable," and so on. These have been grouped into the "Contemporary SOA increases quality of service" characteristic. Chapters 6 and 7 explain how the evolving landscape of Web services specifications addresses typical quality of service (QoS) requirements.

As we step through the following sections we elaborate on each of the characteristics in our list and discuss their overall meaning to SOA. In doing so, we also build a formal definition of contemporary SOA.