FastSOA is an appropriate solution for SOA performance and scalability challenges. Each use case shows how pure XML technology used in the mid-tier mitigates and solves performance and scalability problems and delivers flexibility unavailable with object and relational technology. While there are many (sometimes contradictory) definitions of SOA, most software developers and architects recognize and support SOA as a pattern built around consumers, services, and brokers. Figure 1 shows this relationship. The basic SOA patterns make sense for developers building services, Web Services, and composite applications and data services. The pattern lets a consumer who makes a request to learn the location and interface message schema of a service. The consumer binds to the service by sending a request message. The service returns a response message to the consumer's request. The service makes its location known by publishing the ontology of its functions and interface message schema to the broker. SOA is an abstract architecture - for instance, SOA doesn't define a specific protocol such as SOAP in the Web Services standard - but most SOA designs use XML as the message format between consumer, broker, and service.
