Service Oriented Middleware: Trends and Challenges

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is not only an architecture, rather it is a relationship between the service provider, broker and user. Designing middleware platforms for this architecture really helps in achieving interoperability, loose coupling and high efficiency especially for applications running in heterogeneous environments. The job of an SOA middleware is to cater for the functional properties in addition to supporting the non-functional properties which include scalability, service reliability, service flexibility and Quality of Service (QoS) assurance. This paper reviews the current work in the area and the trends and challenges to be addressed when designing and developing SOA middleware solutions for different application domains. The paper also discusses the main objectives and approaches of the current projects.