Contemporary SOA supports vendor diversity

Contemporary SOA supports vendor diversity


The open communications framework explained in the previous section not only has significant implications for bridging much of the heterogeneity within (and between) corporations, but it also allows organizations to choose best-of-breed environments for specific applications.

For example, regardless of how proprietary a development environment is, as long as it supports the creation of standard Web services, it can be used to create a non-proprietary service interface layer, opening up interoperability opportunities with other, service-capable applications (Figure 3.6). This, incidentally, has changed the face of integration architectures, which now can encapsulate legacy logic through service adapters, and leverage middleware advancements based on Web services.

Organizations can certainly continue building solutions with existing development tools and server products. In fact, it may make sense to do so, only to continue leveraging the skill sets of in-house resources. However, the choice to explore the offerings of new vendors is always there. This option is made possible by the open technology provided by the Web services framework and is made more attainable through the standardization and principles introduced by SOA