BEA recently announced that it is broadening its SOA consulting practice, and that it has created a tool companies can use to learn about SOA and figure out how prepared they are to transition to the new architectural model.
While BEA and other major vendors, such as IBM and Microsoft, continue to deepen their investments in SOA, many of us are still struggling to understand what SOA actually is.
How well do you know SOA? If you were asked to write a definition right now, what would it be? One of the challenges has always been to distinguish SOA from a standard distributed architecture that use Web Services. Another has been to pinpoint exactly what the well-publicized service-orientation paradigm includes.
