Here Q stands for Question, not Quality.

SOA hasn't been my thing in the past, but in an egoistic effort to understand more about it, here's the header post to a series of constructive questions.

Sure, this will more or less just point out things I personally haven't grasped and for the knowledgeable, the questions are easy (as always). But I thought that there might be someone other than me who hasn't grasped these things and will therefore be glad that someone asked and that someone (else) answered.

:-)

Here's the first:

SOA-Q: SOA == WS?

I've heard so many times that SOA isn't the same as WS. But at the same time, I often get the feeling that it is actually implied no matter what is said. How is it today?

Comments?

Update (some answers):

  • johnbr wrote SOA Questions

  • Arnon said:

    Well, it is actually depends on who you are asking

    Vendors (whose ultimate goal is to sell more products = new technology) usually imply you need WS to do proper SOA (or the more elegant WS is a natural candidate for SOA) In real life, what matters most is the SOA concepts First and foremost - business alignment and then additional things like the so called 4 tenets (autonomy, share scheme etc.), service bus (for thing like service location transparency)

    Another thing is that Architecture is (should be) technology agnostic - you can (and I have) create Service oriented architecture and implementations that do not utilize WS at all.

  • Mårten Gustafson wrote SOA.doesNotNecessarilyEquals(WS);

  • Niclas Nilsson said:

    In my humble opinion - absolutely not.

    I've been working with OSGi (www.osgi.org) and it's predecessor since 1998, which to me and many others is a Service Oriented Architecture. I also believe that most people would agree that CORBA is a SOA. And there are plenty more.

    Unfortunately, since a lot of people learns about SOA for the first time when they hear about WS, they seem to use these acronyms interchangeably.