A major benefit of service oriented architecture (SOA) is the ease with which an ecosystem has developed to support it. This ecosystem is made up of a great array of services from a large variety of vendors. The services cover all phases of the development life cycle, including:
- Operational services, such as credit checks.
- Development services, such as registry/repositories.
- Framework services, such as mainframe integration.
- Operational services, such as performance management.
The reason for this is that developers can create useful individual services that others can use to create an SOA solution. The cost of entry into the ecosystem is low as it just requires that the service obeys some basic rules that enable it to interact with other components of the ecosystem. Also, once a service has been defined it is perfectly possible for other developers to create a better implementation of the service...
