Contemporary SOA is a building block

Contemporary SOA is a building block


A service-oriented application architecture will likely be one of several within an organization committed to SOA as the standard architectural platform. Organizations standardizing on SOA work toward an ideal known as the service-oriented enterprise (SOE), where all business processes are composed of and exist as services, both logically and physically.

When viewed in the context of SOE, the functional boundary of an SOA represents a part of this future-state environment, either as a standalone unit of business automation or as a service encapsulating some or all of the business automation logic. In responding to business model-level changes, SOAs can be augmented to change the nature of their automation, or they can be pulled into service-oriented integration architectures that require the participation of multiple applications.

What this all boils down to is that an individual service-oriented application can, in its entirety, be represented by and modeled as a single service. As mentioned earlier, there are no limits to the scope of service encapsulation. An SOA consists of services within services within services, to the point that a solution based on SOA itself is one of many services within an SOE.

This past set of characteristics has further broadened our definition. Let's append the definition with the following:


SOA can establish an abstraction of business logic and technology that may introduce changes to business process modeling and technical architecture, resulting in a loose coupling between these models. These changes foster service-orientation in support of a service-oriented enterprise .