SOA vs. Web Services

SOA vs. Web Services

People tend to associate Service Oriented Architecture with World Wide Web based services. The two, however, are not one and the same, and thus must be distinguished from one another. Web services will have to be elucidated elsewhere.

For the moment, we are going to focus on Service Oriented Architecture in order to understand how it is distinct from Web based services.

When Object Oriented programming first began to get popular, C++ was an emerging programming language that also had strong support for object oriented methods of programming. But it was not correct to say that a C++ program was object oriented. While object orientation happens to be an architectural approach, C++ is a language through which such an architecture is attained.

One can say the same thing when it comes to Web services and Service Oriented Architecture. “Service Oriented Architecture” is the term that designates a philosophical approach to a solution’s design. The utilization of web services is one method by which such an architecture might be attained.

But the use of web services is not the only way one might go about building a Service Oriented Architecture. Just as it is possible to utilize C++ language without the use of an object oriented program, one can also have web services without the use of Service Oriented Architecture.

SOA vs. Other Architectures

Some observers claim that Service Oriented Architecture is merely another way that services and software can be sold. But SOA is a lot more than merely a buzz word. At the beginning, software was a set of code that ran somewhere on a large mainframe computer. This was where input was provided in the form of, say, punch cards.

As computer technology began to evolve, users would make use of simple text based terminals as a means of entering data, schedule jobs, etc. But software continued to grow larger. Rarely would other forms of software be relied upon to do these jobs.

Business logic steadily evolved over time so that much of the interface was moved to individual users’ desktops, while core Business logic and storage remained on a back room main computer. A lot of these applications still function in Businesses around the globe.