The Three Faces of SOA

原文：

Among software people, the word “architecture” is commonly used in three distinct contexts: application architecture, infrastructure architecture, and entERPrise architecture. The notion of service-oriented architecture spans all three of these areas. Yet whenever somebody talks about SOA, he or she is often implicitly thinking about only one of them. Developers are mostly interested in the challenges of building service-oriented applications, for instance, and so their focus tends to be on the application architecture ASPects of SOA. A vendor of Web services management tools commonly thinks of SOA primarily in the infrastructure sense, while an enterprise architect at a user organization is likely to be concerned mainly with SOA’s enterprise aspects.

All three perspectives have value. Here are simple descriptions of each one:

- Service-oriented application architecture: Guidelines, patterns, and practices for creating service-oriented applications. People who focus on platforms for service-oriented software and on the architecture of individual applications tend to emphasize this perspective. Technologies such as Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and the recently-announced Service Component Architecture (SCA) are directly relevant here.

- Service-oriented infrastructure architecture: Guidelines, patterns, and practices for managing and operating service-oriented applications. Big thinkers about SOA sometimes give this perspective short shrift, but anybody who’s actually trying to make it real knows how important these issues are. Vendors like AmberPoint and Actional are focused here.

- Service-oriented enterprise architecture: Guidelines, patterns, and practices for using and getting business value from service-oriented applications. Technical issues still appear here, but many of the biggest concerns revolve around people. (In fact, I’d argue that this view of SOA encompasses the most difficult challenges--people are usually more problematic than technology.) Advice on SOA from analyst firms such as ZapThink often emphasizes these aspects.

I’ve seen people argue about the meaning (and even the value) of SOA when their real difference was that one took an application-focused view while the other took an enterprise view. Words are only useful when we can agree on what they mean, and so having a clearer sense of what we’re talking about when we use this overloaded term would be a step in the right direction.

译文：

在开始的时候先介绍一下 SOA 的概念。

什么是 SOA ？

SOA 的全称是 Service Oriented Application ，面向服务的应用。

她是指为了解决在 Internet 环境下业务集成的需要，通过连接能完成特定任务的独立功能实体实现的一种软件系统架构。这句话的意思就是 SOA 不是一门语言或具体的技术，而是一种软件的系统架构，应该说更像一种模式，是一种为了解决复杂的 Internet

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