Web Services – The Fuel For Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

As we are eagerly awaiting the Montreal fest this weekend and with surge in fuel prices, its right time to discuss the driving force behind SOA.

Web Services are the core to a SOA System and they are the driving factor for a lot of present day state of the art systems.Days are gone by where a small piece of change request would require 2 to 4 months of work on the legacy systems with application service provider ASP.
It all depends on the compatibility factor, say for example we need to leverage the functionality of a JCL or a COBOL program to be used in a Visual Basic or AJAX application. It would sound complicated as the solution was designed with a lot of interfaces for the Microsoft or Unix environment; It was really a hard job to perform a couple of years ago. But now It’s web services, a cheat code to a hard to win game. Web Services are a bunch of code within a system which is modular and acts as a plug and play for the users who require a specific service.

By now, web services are far capable, far scalable, far reusable, far accessible and far user friendly to the users. Lets see how Peoplesoft had mastered the Service Oriented Architecture and the various chunks like

• Web Services Creation
• Web Services Publishing, and
• Standards and Technology Behind Web Services

in the following posts. Integration between Peoplesoft and Java Based applications as well as Peoplesoft and Microsoft Sharepoint Services are basically driven by SOA.