Welcome to SOA components

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) defines a software architecture model that is vastly popular for applications integration environments, especially in B2B environments at Internet level and EAI environments at Intranet level.

The basic concept of this architecture is the service. The distributed system nodes offer standardized services to the rest of the system. A service is a self-contained and stateless function that accepts one or more requests and returns one or more responses through a well-defined interface. The services do not depend on the state of other functions or processes.

Another key concept of the architecture is orchestration, by means of which processes are developed by sequencing services execution according to a given logic.

The Web Service technology has now been identified as the implementation of concepts set out in the SOA architecture.

Apart from supporting the service concept, Web Service technology has associated Semantic Web-mediated service characterization and discovery concepts. These, together with the service orchestration capabilities, define a dynamic and flexible applications development environment. Additionally, they open up a wide range of possibilities for a number of tools to be developed within a web navigator to enable dynamic web services discovery, orchestration and invocation.