Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Vs. Component Based Architecture

The goal for a SOA is a world wide mesh of collaborating services, which are published and available for invocation on the Service Bus. Adopting SOA is essential to deliver the business agility and IT flexibility promised by Web Services.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Vs. Component Based Architecture:

SOA seems to be a good step forward to looser coupled software, higher reusability,faster development and probably a completely new style of software development.
The difference between SOA und components seems to consist of:

• Services have to be publically accessible. Models for consumption will probably be developed though not necessarily cost free. But through registries (UDDI) it should be possible to find services like other business partners in the yellow pages.
• Services have to be largely independent from implementation specific attributes. For users and customers it is irrelevant, if the service is released with Java, .NET or Perl. The shared communication is XML based, and as long as no other protocol exits, the protocol will probably be SOAP.

An exact differentiation between Service oriented architecture and component based architecture is hard to make, because opinions on what “SOA” exactly is and how it will develop differ. If SOA is seen as a new type of architecture that defines the how-to of assigning interfaces in a servicing way so that these services can be used in a context free way, it doesn’t differ significantly from existing component based frameworks like Enterprise JavaBeans.

If the definition of SOA includes the usage of technologies like WSDL, UDDI, and SOAP (and its potential successors), SOA differs in several ways from the “old” component based architecture. With these technologies software can be built in a completely new way. Software developers can use foreign, external “components” in the form of Web Services. Web Services can be used in contexts that weren’t considered at the time they were built.

But SOA is not the solution to all problems linked with software development. There are a lot of problems: Ranging from finding the required services, providing acceptable performance, security, realising transactions up to maintaining one’s own service, even if foreign, integrated services have changed or are closed.

There are a lot of problems to resolve, but there are a lot of possibilities too. It will depend on Sun or other larger companies, to develop an overall solution, containing solutions to all of these problems.