It seems that Gartner has launched the concept of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) by the publication of some research work entitled Service-Oriented Architecture: Mainstream Straight Ahead in April 2003 (subscription to Gartner required to read these documents). SOA has become a buzzword. But where to start with to understand this architectural concept?

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Unlike traditional object-oriented architectures, SOA is an architectural concept that promotes loose coupling among software components. A business service is a unit of work done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a service consumer. Software components can play the role of service provider, service consumer or both. Note that the service is separated from the data in SOA, whereas data and methods are bound in classical object-oriented approaches.

Messages between the service consumer and the service provider must be descriptive and not instructive. Messages must be extensible to allow further version of the service.

Services can be stateless or stateful. In a stateless service, the consumer will send all necessary information to the provider. A statful service is more complex because the provider as to store information on his side.

Service orchestration is the operation of sequencing services usually to map the business processes.

Web Services is a Service-Oriented Architecture but it's not the only one. SOAP (XML-based) messages are exchanged from service consumer to service provider.

For SOA beginners, the following articles are good introductions:

• Service-oriented architecture from Wikipedia
• What is Service-Oriented Architecture? by Hao He, September 30, 2003
• New to SOA and Web services from IBM
• An article in French: SOA pour architecture orientée services du Journal du Net

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