This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Summary
So, we can see that the Web services standards, both the core and extended specifications, contribute significantly to the ability to create and maintain service-oriented architectures on which to build new enterprise applications. These applications are often called composite applications because they work through a combination of multiple services.
We've seen that SOA is not an end in itself but a preparation for a longer journey. It's a set of maps and directions to follow that lead to a better IT environment. It's a blueprint for an infrastructure that aligns IT with business, saves money through reuse of assets, rapid application development, and multi-channel access.
Web services have had an initial success with the core standards and are now on to the next step in the journey, which is to define extended features and functions that will support more and more kinds of applications.
Service orientation provides a different perspective and way of thinking than object orientation. It's as significant a change as going from procedure-oriented computing to object-oriented computing. Services tend toward complementary rather than replacement technology, and are best suited for interoperability across arbitrary execution environments, including object oriented, procedure oriented, and other systems.
Footnotes