The Age of Service-oriented Architecture

There has been an increasing momentum within enterprise IT to move to service-oriented architectures (SOA). A service-oriented architecture generally involves an orchestrated collection of services which communicate with each other coordinating some activity. The main objective of such architecture is to consolidate duplicative services and share reusable component services across projects and teams. Web services play a key role of being the vehicle in a service-oriented architecture.

XML-based Distributed Component Services

Web services are usually referred to as distributed component services using HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). During the late 90's, businesses started to adopt XML (Extensible Markup Language) as cross-platform standard for data exchange. In particular, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), an XML-based protocol for expressing application semantics, has gained tremendous momentum in the Web services arena. Web services have since been generally regarded as XML-based or SOAP-based Web services.

SOAP's simplicity and platform independence are widely considered the main reason for Web services' prosperity. In addition, WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) have helped enhance Web services in areas of service advertising and directory publishing.

Is Web Services a Hype?

Yes and no. Like many arising trends in computing technology, Web services were initially overhyped by many industry analysts. Recent statistics indicate that businesses have seen through the hype and strategically adopt Web services for its many long-term benefits, including reduction of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).

According to a recent study by IDC about adoption of Web services, four out of five enterprises intend to undertake Web services projects over the next three years. Today, businesses are utilizing Web services for a variety of business solutions. It is evident that Web services are now critical part of the technology strategy for many businesses.