Web Service-Oriented Architectures

The basic concept of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is as old as distributed computing. The modern Web-based SOA, however, revitalizes this durable concept in three important ways:

• richer and standardized components (Web Services)
• better connections between those components (Internet Middleware)
• more effective user involvement (IIAs )

The core interoperating product components of a Web SOA are:

An increasing range of Web Services provide a rich set of capabilities, and Web Services standards allow an enterprise's Web SOA to leverage capabilities outside the enterprise. To this, Internet Middleware adds asynchronous messaging and event notification to connect these self-contained components more effectively. The resulting Web SOA enables smoother integration between components and makes it easy to add, subtract and reconfigure system components.

While Web Services and Internet Middleware are enabling important improvements in inter-enterprise and intra-enterprise systems, the Holy Grail of fully automated systems is a long way off.  Business processes today require people to be effective -- making key decisions, adding insights, and handling exceptions. This is the gap in Web SOAs that Integrated Internet Applications fill.