SOA Book Offers Answers to 100 Questions

IT Business Edge blogger Loraine Lawson amused me with her Monty Python reference when discussing the current "health" status of SOA. While it has been declared dead, Lawson tells us that it’s "feeling better" and poised for resurrection, according to the same source that heralded its demise in the first place (the Burton Group).

The Burton Group’s Anne Thomas Manes wasn’t suggesting that SOA was dead as an architectural practice. She meant that the acronym wasn’t something that people who supply funds particularly wanted to hear about due to all the hype it generated. Furthermore, Burton Group VP Chris Howard predicted a Lazarus-like resurrection of SOA due to the rise of cloud computing.

Let’s hope that SOA isn’t "resting," like the very deceased Norwegian Blue that Michael Palin’s pet store shopkeeper sells to an obviously incredulous Mr. Praline (John Cleese) in the classic "Parrot Sketch."

SOA is very much alive in the minds of the people who have started down the SOA path or who are already well on their way on the journey. Whether in the beginning stages or somewhere in the middle, contributor InformIT has uploaded a book excerpt that provides the answers to some of the questions that executives, architects and practitioners may find themselves asking about SOA planning, implementation, management and use. The book, "100 SOA Questions: Asked and Answered," does exactly what its title promises by providing the answers to the most critical SOA-related questions asked by technical, architectural and business decision-makers.

Our excerpt, "SOA Basics," provides answers to the following:

• What is SOA?
• Is SOA an architectural style?
• What are the fundamental constructs (the DNA) of SOA?
• What is the difference between a Web service and an SOA service?
• What makes a project an SOA implementation?

Use this excerpt to learn the basic, key concepts of SOA.