The Enterprise SOA vision is all about composite applications. These are applications formed out of numerous independent web services all working together to provide some greater functionality. Except, how exactly do you define how 20 or 30 loosely coupled services interact to form a composite application? How do you deploy 20 or 30 services written in 20 or 30 languages for 20 or 30 different platforms in a sane way? And if you do manage to actually design and deploy the beast, how do you monitor it? The tools needed to make SOA work in the real world mostly don't exist yet. That's o.k. though because most Enterprises are just taking their first baby steps down the road to SOA. So we have a little time to get our act together. This article lays out a vision for how an architecture that will allow enterprises to maximize SOA's benefits.
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