Is SOA a product?

SOA is Delegation of Services to different systems

SOA is the practice of sequestering the core business functions into independent services that don’t change frequently. These services are glorified functions that are called by one or more presentation programs. The presentation programs are volatile bits of software that present data to, and accept data from, various users.

To make this clear, imagine an internet store-front. Customers use a browser to talk to the presentation software that displays the store’s website. The presentation software interprets the gestures of the customer and invokes services that do things like acquiring the data for the current catalog, or registering the customer’s order. Note that the services have no idea they are talking to a website. They could just as well be talking to a thick client, or a 3270 green screen. They simply accept and return data in a standard format that the web system happens to be able to use.

That’s really all there is to it. The rest of SOA is just a matter of details. At the highest level, SOA is nothing more (and nothing less) than separating changeable elements from unchangeable elements. But why is this important?

NO-- Its an Architectural Style

No. SOA is not a product, but an architecture approach and set of patterns for implementing agile, loosely coupled dynamic applications. A reflection of its commitment to developing the standards, guidance, tools and technologies needed for developing cross-platform integration solutions, Microsoft has been using service orientation across its products since 1999, when the Web services was announced and a wave of innovation began that fundamentally changed the application architecture landscape. Beginning with version 1.0 of the .NET Framework, the Microsoft investments in tools, together with platform support for Web services, have helped make Service Orientation mainstream and practical.

Working with other vendors such as IBM and BEA, we invested in authoring a set of specifications referred to collectively as the WS-* architecture. Shortly thereafter, in order to promote interoperability across platforms, operating systems and programming languages, Microsoft worked with IBM to develop the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I). Since it was created, WS-I has grown to roughly 150 member companies and has created Web services that address areas such as interoperability, security and the reliability of messaging.