Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
respond to changing market conditions and seize opportunities for gaining
competitive advantage.
SOA with Web Services can better automate business processes because
Web Services help achieve the goals of BPM more quickly and easily.
7. 6 Su m m a r y
Large-scale enterprise applications are increasingly being woven together
from applications, packages, and components that were never designed to
work together and may even run on incompatible platforms. This gives rise
to a critical need for interoperability, one that becomes even more impor-
tant as organizations start building a new generation of wide-area integrated
applications that directly incorporate functions hosted by business partners
and specialist service providers. Services and service-oriented architectures
are pragmatic responses to the complexity and interoperability problems
encountered by the builders of previous generations of large-scale integrated
applications. Although it is possible to design and build
service-oriented sys-
tems
using any distributed computing or integration middleware, only Web
Services technologies can today meet the critical requirement for seamless
interoperability that is such an important part of the service-oriented vision.
Just as J2EE middleware lets Java client applications call methods provided
by J2EE components, the main purpose of SOA and Web Services is to enable
applications to invoke functionality provided by other applications (devel-
oped in different languages and platforms). This chapter presented the
definition and characteristics of service-oriented architectures along with
alternate approaches to realizing the vision of service-oriented systems,
namely, Web Services and RESTful services.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search