Global SOA

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Global SOA is a term that is sometimes used to describe the the largest and most pervasive instance of Service Oriented Architecture known: the non-visual data and services portion of the World Wide Web. From this viewpoint, the Global SOA consists of the sum total of Web services and other data feeds that presently exist on the Internet at any given time. The Global SOA itself describes a rich, shareable world-wide ecosystem of information and operational infrastructure used by Web mashups, composite applications, open API consumers, and other online data integration scenarios. Without a working Global SOA, HTML markup and other methods of mixing content and form online can otherwise make application-to-service and service-to-service data exchange and interoperability challenging or unreliable. The richness of the Global SOA today may explain the high degree of multi-site integration of many modern Web applications.

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[edit] Definition

The Global SOA is a large open, federated, and participatory instance of SOA on the Web, consisting entirely of loosely cooperating entities that create and operate non-visual data services. As the Internet is the largest computer network that exists today, it is currently believed that the Global SOA is likely the largest instance of SOA known. The rise of Web services in the late 1990s laid the common conceptual foundation upon which the services on the Internet, and the Global SOA specifically, have proliferated ever since.

Any entity that exposes public Web services or data endpoints of any kind on the Internet is making an implicit contribution to the Global SOA. There is no known complete registry of globally available services existing at present, but certain directories do exist.[1] Besides the hundreds of open Web APIs that are offered today[2], there are also millions of RSS and ATOM feeds which contain structured, machine-readable data that are currently in operation and can be consumed in the Global SOA by any participant that desires to.

There is now an emerging set of open APIs designed to make integration between Web sites and Web applications in the Global SOA easier and more standardized, including OpenID and others. See Technologies below for more details.

It is anticipated that the Global SOA will continue to grow in size and importance as machine-readable data services become as relied upon as traditional visual Web pages and online user experiences. The continuing advent of the Semantic Web and Web 3.0, depending on their eventual level of adoption, will also heavily consume as well as provide services for the Global SOA.

The term Global SOA originally appeared in print in an article in SOA World Magazine in late 2005.[3]

[edit] Technologies

Modern SOA currently emphasizes open Web services standards such as SOAP and WSDL. The Global SOA encompasses these and any technology, standard, or format which can be used to transmit data or otherwise interoperate between a set of endpoints on the Internet.

These technologies and standards include, but are not limited to:

Also included are the emerging technologies and standards from DataPortability.org including OAuth, OpenID, and others.

It is also likely the rise of Web widgets and other network transferred programmatic components form an emerging new aspect of the Global SOA.

[edit] References

  1. ^ John Musser. Programmable Web.
  2. ^ John Musser. Programmable Web Open API Directory.
  3. ^ Dion Hinchcliffe (December, 2005). Web 2.0: The Global SOA. "SOA World Magazine". SYS-CON Media.

[edit] Further reading