Raising the Degree of Service-Orientation of a SOA-based Software System: A Case Study

摘要

The term 'service-oriented architecture (SOA)' has been gaining popularity in the Department of Defense's (DoD) software engineering and IT community in recent years. It has become the next 'big thing' and is the buzz word used at technical conferences and high level management meetings. But the term 'service-orientation' has caused much confusion among program sponsors, government IT managers, and software professionals. Its apparent ambiguity has let them to claim their own interpretations of SOA. Many have been led to the notion that a technical architecture deemed service-oriented is simply one comprised of Web services. This is a common but dangerous assumption that leads to the number one mistake made by projects intending to adopt SOA-the perception that the benefits promised by current mainstream SOA are attainable solely through an implementation using the Web services platform. This paper will present a case study to illustrate that building an SOA-based application is not just about applying a particular set of technologies and standards but by following a set of sound design principles based on service-orientation. The biggest contribution of this paper is to show, by conducting a case study, that the use of Web services alone does not make a system service-oriented. The results of this paper can be used by IT professionals in the DoD to better evaluate the degree of service-orientation for a software system's architecture.