Monday, December 26, 2005

Was Web Services the first SOA Implementation

That’s sounds really great to hear the music of SOA prevailing all around with the WCF.I would like to mention here is that SOA and WCF are two different things. Many of us are of false impression that SOA and WCF are the two phases of the same coin.SOA are another guidelines of implementing the distributed apps. It is a design guideliness and helps us to get benefited from the past bitter experiences and WCF is the practical implementation of SOA.We always says that we are selling Services through SOA. So what’s the difference between web services and services of SOA? Of course it’s quiet debating that web services are the first step to achieve SOA implementation. But are web services practically implementing the so called four tenets of SOA. First of all, web services are only invoked through HTTP which makes it tightly coupled with the HTTP transport protocol. Though it has been a bit changes after WSE 2.0. What about the communication techniques in ASMX? It has only one i.e. request/response. WCF on the other hand implements all the four tenets of SOA. With Unification of distributed technologies that are prevailing till now. SOA has a messaging protocol as SOAP but the communication techniques can be duplex, simplex and even request response. I often heard that services needs to be asynchronous to be scalable but we also can't deny the fact that applications do requires immediate response. Nevertheless, if we say that web services was the first step for implementing SOA , I do feel to shout about its negligence of practically implementing the autonomous tenet of Service Orientation.

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