Tuesday, May 15, 2007

What is SOA?

Wikipedia

There is no widely-agreed upon definition of service-oriented architecture other than its literal translation that it is an architecture that relies on service-orientation as its fundamental design principle. Service-orientation describes an architecture that uses loosely coupled services to support the requirements of business processes and users. Resources on a network[1] in an SOA environment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation.[2] These concepts can be applied to business, software and other types of producer/consumer systems.

Search oriented architecture


The use of search engine technology as the main integration component in an information system. In a traditional business environment the architectural layer usually occupied by a relational database management system(RDBMS) is supplemented or replaced with a search engine or the indexing technology used to build such engines. Queries for information which would usually be performed using Structured Query Language(SQL) are replaced by keyword or fielded(or field-enabled) searches for structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data.

In a typical multi-tier or N tier architecture information is maintained in a Data-Tier where it can be stored and retrieved from a database or file system. The data tier is queried by the logic or business tier when information is needed using a data retrieval language like SQL.


This is why I try to stay away from acronyms and am very careful in my use of terminoloy.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

SOA is also commonly implemented with web services.

Alice said...

so much so that I thought they were the same, but then I discovered that they are not the same.

just when I think I have something down pat something emerges that oversets everthing