Looking in or looking out  

I have been struggling to describe the intent of service orientated architecture (SOA). Sitting down with our CEO Craig Donato yesterday he helped organize the disorganized mess of thoughts I was having. The key insight was that SOA's are not intended to create simple end points and smart networks rather the intent is to create smart networks to enable more sophisticated applications to be created by weaving together services.

The services are not necessarily simple, we have tended to start there but the real value is creating smart services. The difference among smart services and existing applications is the design center is outward facing rather than our current applications focus being more inward facing and hence the design center tends to be monolithic.

The intent of an SOA is to solve complex problems by weaving together a set of services through a loosely coupled infrastructure. The services that participate in an SOA solution may be simple or sophisticated services. The key design goal for services is to enable interaction with other services in a loosley coupled framework

posted by John McDowall | 9:59 AM