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•Article: Service-Oriented Architecture

Historically, integrating applications from multiple vendors into a cohesive solution has been a major challenge for all types of organizations. Integration efforts often require both in-depth application programming interface (API) knowledge of each system and numerous one-to-one integrations between each system. This creates far too many integration points for organizations to effectively develop and maintain.

In response, enterprise application integration (EAI) efforts were developed in an attempt to simplify the integration of different systems by creating a common layer to manage these integrations. While this simplified the integration of each component system, it still required complex integration code to combine multiple systems into an effective enterprise solution. Though EAI efforts simplified the architecture, they remained complex to create, difficult to both maintain and upgrade, and in effect, just concentrated "the mess in a closet."

Today, the technology industry is buzzing about a new approach to integrating business systems: Service-oriented architectures (SOA). SOA is not a product or technology; it's a technique for designing large, enterprise applications. Instead of requiring an in-depth knowledge of each underlying system's API, SOA focuses on exposing systems as services. Developers responsible for a new business system can focus on the task they need the system to perform and the data required to perform the task. There is no need to be concerned with the programming implications of this task. By using standard data formats and communication protocols, many of the obstacles to integrating disparate systems are greatly simplified.

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•Article: Service-Oriented Architecture