What is service-oriented architecture?

[An introduction to SOA]

SOA从技术上说并没有新的东西,因为根本没有新的技术产生,SOA是一个设计原则,但是它确实可以很好的提高生产率,通过整合企业现有资源,提高资源利用和生产效率,无须抛弃原有的投资,无须重新改造老的系统,基于SOA的原则,有效的利用老的资源,并与新的投资进行整合,发挥最大合力.就好比福特发明流水线作业模式大大提高了工人的生产效率一样,SOA也将扮演类似的角色,通过service Bus和business rule engine,连接企业各个系统,甚至不同企业的系统,最大程度的可扩展性,重用性.

下面是Raghu R. Kodali说明的SOA介绍.
原文:http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-06-2005/jw-0613-soa.html
中文:http://www.matrix.org.cn/resource/article/44/44070_SOA.html

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an evolution of distributed computing based on the request/reply design paradigm for synchronous and asynchronous applications. An application's business logic or individual functions are modularized and presented as services for consumer/client applications. What's key to these services is their loosely coupled nature; i.e., the service interface is independent of the implementation. Application developers or system integrators can build applications by composing one or more services without knowing the services' underlying implementations. For example, a service can be implemented either in .Net or J2EE, and the application consuming the service can be on a different platform or language.