Oracle SOA - Why the Shift to Service-Oriented Architecture?

Service Oriented Architecture SOA Oracle - Why the Shift to Service-Oriented Architecture?

Many companies are addressing the complexity of their application and IT environments with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA provides an enterprise architecture that supports building connected enterprise applications. SOA facilitates the development of enterprise applications as modular business Web services that can be easily integrated and reused, creating a truly flexible, adaptable IT infrastructure.

Web services provide interoperability of proprietary software. Web services standards, including Web Services Description Language (WSDL), extensible markup language (XML), and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), have emerged as an effective and highly interoperable platform for publishing services. In addition, high performance binding frameworks enable enterprises to access legacy systems and native Java code without having to wrap them in a SOAP interface.

Making Web services work is a two-step process:

1. Publish the service.

Publishing a service involves taking a function within an existing application or system and making it available in a standard way.

2. Compose, or orchestrate, the services into business flows.

Orchestration involves composing multiple services into an end-to-end business process. The business process execution language (BPEL) language supports this orchestration.

Source: Oracle SOA, Service Oriented Architecture SOA Oracle software information at Oracle.com