Terminology

While SOA has been around for a few years, many businesses, vendors, media and even analysts still struggle to understand what SOA really means.  For this reason, this page was designed to help organizations understand common SOA terms.

Common SOA Terminology

SOA - Basic Concepts

Service - Standards and Protocols

SOA - Advanced Concepts

Governance
In the context of SOA, governance defines the model to ensure optimal reuse of services and enforcement of corporate policies (e.g., business design, technical design, and application security).

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HTTP
HyperText Transfer Protocol is the Web's communication standard that defines the universal mechanism for exchanging application-level messages between Web devices.

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ISE
Integrated SODA Environment represents a suite of integrated development tools and technologies used for building service oriented and composite applications.

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Loose Coupling
Loose coupling is a key attribute of SOA solutions, in that it means there are minimal dependencies among services and this allows the quick assembly of different business solutions from different combinations of business services from a variety of systems.

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Native Service
Typically used within an SOA infrastructure when a web service does not make sense from a performance or security aspect, a native service is exposed and consumed through its programming language interface (e.g., Java or C#).

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Release Management
In the context of SOA, release management defines the model to ensure the "deploy once run from everywhere" promise can be realized in the SOA environment that becomes exponentially more complicated as services are added.

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REST
Representational State Transfer is a model for web services based solely on HTTP. REST takes the view that the Web already has everything necessary for web services, without having to add extra specifications like SOAP and UDDI. Any item can be made available (i.e., represented) at a URI, and, subject to the necessary permissions, it can be manipulated using one of the simple operations defined within HTTP (GET to retrieve information, PUT and POST to modify it, DELETE to remove it).

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Service
In the context of SOA, a service is a self contained business function in which consumers interact through a well defined interface (contract). In this model, the consumer does not know (or care) "how" the service implements the requested business action - only that the service performs "what" is defined by its published interface (contract).

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Service Consumer
The service consumer initiates the application interaction by locating the service in the registry, binding to the service (or its proxy) over a transport, and executing the service function. The service consumer executes the service by sending it a request formatted according to the provider's contract.

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Service Oriented Architecture
A Service Oriented Architecture provides patterns for design, development, deployment and management of a loosely coupled business application infrastructure. In this framework, business functionality is published, discovered, and consumed as part of a business ecosystem of network-aware and reusable technical and business services.

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Service Provider
The service provider is a network-addressable entity that accepts and executes requests from consumers. It can be a mainframe system, a component, or some other type of software system that executes the service request. The service provider publishes its contract in the registry for access by service consumers.

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Service Registry
A service registry is a network-based directory that contains information about available services. It is an entity that accepts and stores contracts from service providers and provides those contracts to interested service consumers. The service registry may also act as proxy for the provider, enabling the consumer to interact with a single point of contact for all required services.

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SOAD
Service Oriented Analysis and Design is an approach to software modeling and development specially designed for service oriented architecture. SOAD provides guidance for the design, build, aggregation, and deploy of applications as web services, built with SOAP, WSDL and UDDI technologies.

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SOAP
Simple Object Access Protocol is the standard for web services messages. Based on XML, SOAP defines an envelope format and various rules for describing its contents. Seen (with WSDL and UDDI) as one of the three foundation standards of web services, it is the preferred protocol for exchanging web services.

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SOBA
Service Oriented Business Applications represent the expected end state of the service oriented architecture vision. That is, SOBAs are business applications that function in a service oriented environment to provide discrete units of business-level functionality through well defined service contracts (keeping the services encapsulated and self-contained). Within the SOA model these services can be dynamically combined as needed by the business.

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SODA
Service Oriented Development of Applications represents the service oriented programming style of software development. With this style, SODA applies the concepts of a service oriented architecture to the design of a single application. In other words, applications are created from software services.

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SOMA
Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture refers to the more general domain of service modeling necessary to design and create a service oriented architecture. SOMA covers a broader scope and implements service oriented analysis and design through the identification, specification and realization of services, components and flows.

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UDDI
Universal Description Discovery and Integration is a directory model for web services. UDDI is a specification for maintaining standardized directories of information about web services, recording their capabilities, location and requirements in a universally recognized format. Seen (with SOAP and WSDL) as one of the three foundation standards of web services.

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Web Service
One type of service that can be part of an SOA infrastructure, a web service is defined by a set of technologies that provide platform-independent protocols and standards used for exchanging data between applications.

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WSDL
Web Services Description Language is the standard format for describing a web service. A WSDL definition describes how to access a web service and what operations it will perform. Usually pronounced 'whizz-dul' (to rhyme with 'whistle'), WSDL is seen (with SOAP and UDDI) as one of the three foundation standards of web services.

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WSRP
Web Services for Remote Portlets are dynamic plug-ins for portal pages. WSRP defines how to plug remote web services into the pages of online portals and other user-facing applications. This allows portal or application owners to easily embed a web service from a third party into a section of a portal page (a 'portlet'). The portlet then displays interactive content and services that are dynamically updated from the provider's own servers.

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XML
eXtensible Markup Language is a general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages. It is a simplified subset of SGML, capable of describing many different kinds of data. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet.

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