Dear Marco wagner, Service Oriented Architecture which was introduced in the year 2007 by researchers Issarny, Caporuscio and Georgantas where they noted:

“The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm supports the development of distributed software systems in terms of loosely coupled networked services. In SOA, networked resources are made available as autonomous software services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying technologies. A key feature of SOA is that services are independent entities, with well defined interfaces, which can be invoked in a standard way, without requiring the client to have knowledge about how the service actually performs it’s tasks”

In view of this note we can say “services should be made resource aware”. Adaptability and stability will always be the parts of SOA. Further, it seems that SOA insights to have a symbiotic relationship with developments in application structure. Currently, SOA is enabling Grid computing, Ubiquitous computing, and Web Services. Looking to to great need of these applications, the trend of SOA is itself being changed to meet those challenges and needs.

If you're considering possible developmental paths for this paradigm, it may help to logically draw parallels to object oriented design. What we're seeing here is effective the advance of communication technology extending the OOD principles to cover more than the function scope of a single system, or rather covering the full scope of a super-system. Afaq makes the astute observation of SOA being comprised of individual subsystems as independent entities acting in a symbiotic relationship. This takes us to the Single Responsibility Principle, where in this context we're not dealing with classes as in OOP but rather software applications, which for all intents and purposes operate independently and have specific, protected roles with interfaces calling methods and exchanging data between the two.

A good example here is media dissemination. In NL for instance, there are a select few organizations handling news articles, entertainment reviews, media segments such as trailers and journalistic reports, and so on. The overwhelming majority of news websites, media sites and even major television channels get their media through these parties (Novum with their "Maos" system being a major player, though not the only one) By and large these companies have only one core business - to generate media or pull it in from foreign parties, and offer it to their clients via a REST protocol that responds with JSON values or, in the more archaic systems, XML feeds.

In short, I think that as bandwidth limits recede and communication technology continues to advance you can expect to see more and more niche "data markets" pop up where companies trade data as if it were any other commodity, and services that rely on them to offer derivative consumer/B2B services, software systems that rely on e.g. having normally impossible quantities of computing power available, centralized information networks, data synchronization and access to feeds and electronic services.

Thank you for these very interesting answers!

Afaq, I am aware of SOA implementations in the three fields you mentioned.

Let's go a bit more into detail in Ubiquitous Computing: I think one need that comes up with this topic is, that very small and cheap embedded devices are integrated into more and more products around us. These embedded devices will have to connect to the overall system possibly in a Service-based manner.

What kind of technology will be used in these future systems? Will current standards like DPWS be used (I do think this standard still causes an overhead too big to be managed by really small embedded devices)? If not, what other technologies might be used in order to create really small Service-stacks?

Marco

According to references available on Internet, service oriented approach started appearing in theory of economy somewhere in the second half of 20th century. At the time the circumstances mature, many companies accept the new economy paradigm, see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_economy, with IBM the example for ICT domain.

Service oriented approach has been recognized in distributed embedded systems recently and will evolve in its natural way, following the needs of companies, for which they are designed.

Microservices may interest you ( http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html ), it is the combination of REST services and the Unix design philosophy.

Apparently Netflix's A. Cockcroft initially mentioned it ( http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Adrian-Cockcroft-Netflix ). He (AC) also advocated the use of mobile components in the data center (Arm SoC).

Dear Frédéric,

thanks for the interesting links! I think Microservices really follows the idea that I have about bringing SOA to the embedded world: Make use of the basic principles, forget about the standards and implementations.

I recently discovered that SOA also hits the automotive market with the introduction of SOME/IP. However, both approaches mentioned here make use of IP-based protocols.

What do you think: is SOA really bounded to this class of networks?

Marco

Hello Marco,

The idea of SOA is not only applicable to IP-networks. However, complying to standards makes some things easier, as in Netflix's deployment of new versions of a service in the cloud (but I cannot say that the numerous SOA standards are a good thing). The same ideas and benefits (such as separation of concern) could be applied to the embedded world. The automotive world probably has standards of it's own. This is also similar to the Erlang approach, where applications are composed of multiple services, with failover mechanisms (although Erlang is an integrated system, unlike SOA).