The advent of SOA and standard-base Web services together with Internet based delivery models has provided the essential base for facilitating new software platform innovations. One of these innovations is a breakthrough software componentization technique that we have coined Service Oriented Programming (SOP). While SOA focuses on communication between systems using “service operations,” SOP provides a new technique to build agile application modules using in-process, native service operations as the “units of assembly.” Instead of using services just to go across systems, SOP provides a model-driven technique that uses an in-memory image of services to run an entire application. Since these in-memory services can transparently externalize through Web service standards or any proprietary protocol, SOP automatically brings SOA inside the application modules and enables real-time integration from “inside,” thus eliminating the need for costly data replication. SOP modules can adopt to change and integrate orders of magnitude faster and easier than it’s possible with SOA alone.
