The Million Dollar SOA Question: Software ESBs or Hardware Appliances?
Service-oriented architectures have now become the norm for IT to deliver value to their respective businesses. A SOA-based approach promises an environment of agility, loosely coupled integration, and a composition-based approach, all of which results in faster adaptability to the demands of the business, lower operational costs, and the increased “pluggability” of standards-based applications. A service is nothing but an abstraction of something that does some business unit of work. This could be something like placing an order, retrieving customer information, or modifying personal information. Technically these services could be exposed with any binding/protocol/interface with request/response parameters being structured or ad-hoc data. Standards-based services have their payloads structured as XML.
