Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has taken modular programming principals in to the distributed computing environment. But the functionality provided by such modules are much broader and hence, can be considered as services. When applications are deployed in a distributed computing environment there is a need for set of infrastructure services like, life cycle management, service announcement, service discovery, security, integration, etc. Applications which provides these infrastructure services make up the SOA platform. The most common approach to implement applications using SOA is to make use of web services. Considering the advantages of use of FOSS solutions in application development, its worth evaluating web service based FOSS options in building a SOA platform.
