Dave Olander

The emergence of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) is an exciting development, providing a springboard for the advancement of flexible, dynamic distributed computing solutions. For those not familiar with SOAs, you can think of them as loosely coupled pieces of applications that are published, consumed, and combined with other applications over a network. These are in contrast to existing, tightly coupled distributed computing platforms (such as CORBA, DCOM, or RMI) in that they offer dynamic discovery and binding of application functionality through service descriptions that provide the details on what a given piece of an application does and how its services can be accessed. Sounds a lot like Web services, doesn't it? Well, Web services represents a form of SOA that is currently making its mark on the IT industry. It is a distributed computing technology that e... (more)