Perspectives on service oriented architecture

SOA and Web services are the hottest topics of discussion currently with regards to enterprise architecture. The technologies are maturing from a standardization perspective and the level of understanding of various aspects of a SOA is gradually rising with an increasing number of clients thinking about service implementation and adoption. This trend has generated significant interest in IT and business circles alike, owing to the promise of bridging the gap between business strategists and IT architects. Service Oriented Architecture builds upon decades of distributed computing technologies and advocates the delivery of software applications in the form of an open interface based on strict contracts, leading to loosely coupled systems which are implementation independent. This tutorial will focus on providing an overview of service oriented architecture with emphasis on the evolution of SOA from other technologies such as object oriented programming and distributed computing. Subsequently, the tutorial will delve into exploring SOA from multiple perspectives, such as the relevance of SOA in EAI, SOA features of J2EE and .NET apart from illustrating specific recommendations on migrating to SOA based on some: sample implementations.