A Comparison of Service Oriented Architecture with other advances in Software Architectures

Abstract

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) allows software systems to possess desirable architecture attributes such as loose coupling, platform independence, inter-operability, reusability, agility and so on. Despite its wide adoption in the form of Web services, many stakeholders both from academia and industry have limited understanding of its underlying principles. This has led to faulty implementations of SOA and in some cases, it has been implemented in places where it is not suitable. In this paper, we investigate and show the relationship between SOA and other advances in software architecture. The paper relates SOA to Architecture Patterns, Components and Connectors. We advance the view that SOA’s uniqueness and strength does not lie in its computational elements but in the way it enables and handles their interaction. In this way, we facilitate the understanding of SOA in terms of other advances in software architectures that are already well understood. We believe that a good understanding of SOAs in terms of other advances in software architectures will help to reap its enormous benefits.