Chapter 13. SOA Integration—Functional View, Implementation, and Architecture

Let us not expect this chapter to be a primer on Services-Orientated Architecture (SOA). The focus of this chapter is to place SOA in the context of Modernization. SOA can be over hyped and has been, in some cases, exploited by IT vendors as the 'holy grail' of software architecture. However, in the context of Legacy Modernizaton, an SOA Integration architecture can bring your legacy environment into the world of the World Wide Web, Web 2.0, and all the other latest Internet-based IT architectures. Within days, a legacy system can be accessed via a web browser. This is one of the biggest advantages Legacy SOA Integration has over other types of Legacy Modernization. Your time-to-market in weeks, instead of months or years.

Although not a primer, let's first make sure we are all talking the same language when we talk SOA. Though the concepts behind SOA are not new, SOA is also not yet mature. SOA in it current form has really been around only five years now. The concepts of standards-based protocol handlers, pre-defined communication schemas, and remote method invocations have been around for decades. To get a better understanding of SOA, let's see what SOA is, and what SOA is not: