An industry view on service-oriented architecture and Web services

Web services are autonomous software systems identifiable by URIs that can be advertised, located, and accessed through standard based XML messages (e.g. SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI) and transmitted via Internet protocols. Web services encapsulate application functionalities and information resources, and make them available through programmatic interfaces, as opposed to the typical interfaces provided by traditional Web applications specifically for manual interactions like in "Web services computing: advancing software interoperability" by J. Chung et al. (2003). Web services integration enables a dynamic e-business model that fosters collaboration with heterogeneous business services and opens the doors for new business opportunities. A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an application framework that takes everyday business applications and breaks them down into individual business functions and processes, called services. With the widely acceptance and adoption of SOA that wraps software resources over the network as services and provides a standard based IT infrastructure, we anticipate and envision more opportunities for the software industry to adopt a service business model. We discuss dynamic Web services integration and show various patterns when implementing on demand integrations. We present guidelines for applying the SOA approach to several industrial business scenarios and for selecting Web services technologies. We conclude with our view about the trends and directions of Web services and SOA in the on demand world.