Unraveling the reality of SOA in integration environments

Abstract

The rudimentary principle of SOA (Service oriented architecture) is "reuse". In hub and spoke integration projects leveraging SOA, creating service components with high reuse becomes a huge challenge and results in the problem of either the service component just enabling integration which in turn has very poor reuse when new consumers are introduced or mere reuse theoretically but not enabling integration. This is because the Integration paradigm is focused on one extreme (integrating applications) whilst the SOA paradigm believes in the other extreme (reuse of components). In this paper, we discuss the core dimensions of problems faced in a real world integration environment when combining SOA and integration solutions and propose trade off mechanisms. © 2009 IEEE.