Service Oriented Architecture: Protocol Interfacing

The widespread emergence of the Internet in the mid 1990s as a platform for electronic data distribution and the advent of structured information have revolutionized our ability to deliver information to any corner of the world. While the introduction of Extensible Markup Language (XML) (Doug, 1999) as a structured format was a major enabling factor, the promise offered by SOAP (Duane, 2007) based web services triggered the discovery of architectural patterns that are now known as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) (Duane, 2007; Susanti, 2011). Service Oriented Architecture is an architectural paradigm and discipline that may be used to build infrastructures enabling those with needs (consumers) and those with capabilities (providers) to interact via services across disparate domains of technology and ownership. Services act as the core facilitator of electronic data interchanges yet require additional mechanisms in order to establish communication between them. Several new trends in the computer industry rely upon SOA as the enabling foundation. This white paper discusses specializations for advanced data exchanges within enterprise service oriented environments and illustrates some of the common architectures of these new platforms.