SOA and Web Services

Businesses are being managed by increasingly complex systems. Yet as business needs change, they must still ensure that their technologies remain aligned with business goals. Failure to do so compromises organizational agility. Having the ability to keep up means replacing disparate legacy applications with an organized and highly integrated infrastructure based on the concepts of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services.

What is SOA? Depending on whom you ask, you will get answers that include "big" and "amorphous", "a set of development tools'," "an enterprise service architecture," "a back-end messaging and bussing system," or "a collection of services necessary to support the business requirements of end users." The correct answer is all of the above. SOA is as much a philosophy as it is a loosely coupled architectural structure.

What are Web Services? The answer here is more straight forward. Web Services is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Web services are frequently just Web APIs that can be accessed over a network, such as the Internet, and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services. Web Services ‘communicate’ using the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and the Web Services Description Language (WDSL).

SOA and Web Services enable businesses to reach the highest state of architectural maturity with standardized technology, business modularity, and IT alignment. Organizations with SOA and Web Services have enterprise agility and the ability to quickly respond to changes in a business model that unites people, process, information, connectivity and reusability from a Business Process Management (BPM) perspective.

The SOA/Web Services model is ever-changing. Software products, such as IBM’s WebSphere Portal 6.0, are SOA/Web Services enabled to facilitate quicker, more efficient integration with other systems. The latest incantation is the merging with Web 2.0 technologies to address issues normally handled through PC-based software, resulting in faster, cheaper, and more flexible solutions. Add in the other spheres of architectural design, and SOA become the architecture of choice for any business.

PSC is a pioneer in the development and use of SOA and Web Services to better solve business problems. Using Frameworks and SOA or Web Services together has enabled us to create reusable solutions in an agile environment that keeps development and maintenance costs to a minimum. This capability was recently acknowledged by naming PSC the winner of the 2007 IBM Lotus Software award for Best People-Centric SOA Solution.