ABSTRACT

Services and service-oriented architectures are pragmatic responses to the complexity and interoperability problems encountered by the builders of previous generations of large-scale integrated applications. Although it is possible to design and build service-oriented systems using any distributed computing or integration middleware, only Web Services technologies can today meet the critical requirement for seamless interoperability that is such an important part of the service-oriented vision. This chapter presents the definition and characteristics of service-oriented architectures along with approaches to realizing the vision of service-oriented systems with Web Services and RESTful services respectively. The last part of the chapter shows how with an ESB SOA implementation, previously isolated ERP, CRM, supply chain management, and financial and other legacy systems can become SOA enabled and integrated more effectively than when relying on custom, point-to-point coding or proprietary EAI technology.