Defining a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the current challenge of many enterprise IT organizations. The emergent popularity of Web services, and the ease of implementation, has enabled most organizations to adopt an incremental approach to SOA via Web services.  However, the larger architectural issues must be analyzed and addressed in order to expand SOA. SOA is first and foremost, an enterprise architecture discipline. Service oriented practitioners agree that the ‘service’ is the new unit of planning and management in an EA framework. The same practitioners will also note that SOA reference architectures, policies and guidance are essential to a successful program.

This course sets the context for describing an SOA from an architectural perspective and provides a detailed understanding of the elements that comprise SOA, as well as techniques and practices for creating organization-wide software integration solutions using SOA concepts.  This session will describe how to develop an application architecture as a collection of loosely-coupled business services.  The lesson enables architects to identify integration patterns best suited for Web services technologies and explore Web services design best practices.