What is a standards based SOA ?

In the early days of SOA discussions, many people would have understood the term SOA to relate to implementing services using the following standards amongst others:

-         TCP/IP and HTTP to provide the connectivity to the machine(s) where the services reside.

-         eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to provide a platform, technology and language neutral way to exchange messages.

-         Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) which enables a service to describe in XML what it can do and how to call it. This is the piece that enables software to understand what a service can do and how to call it without any software installation being required on the client system accessing the service.

-         Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) which is used to build the request message (based on what was learned from the WSDL) to issue a request to a service and to receive a response from a service.

Using the above standards, technologies like MS InfoPath and many other technologies that understand these standards can:

-         Connect to another computer and request the WSDL for a service using TCP/IP and HTTP.

-         Receive and parse the WSDL (written in XML) to determine what methods the service offers.

-         Build a SOAP request to invoke the service and to understand the SOAP response from the service.

While SOA has come to mean different things to different organizations depending on what they are trying to sell, using the above standards and other related standards will ensure your services can be used again and again by multiple technologies on multiple different platforms and represents the ‘standards based SOA’ mentioned in the title. The SOA Gateway enables the creation of standards based services using configuration and without any coding whatsoever.