Web services promote an environment for systems that is loosely
coupled and interoperable. Many of the concepts for Web services
come from a conceptual architecture called service-oriented
architecture (SOA). SOA configures entities (services,
registries, contracts, and proxies) to maximize loose coupling
and reuse. This chapter describes these entities and their
configuration in an abstract way. Although you will probably use
Web services to implement your service-oriented architecture,
this chapter explains SOA without much mention of a particular
implementation technology. This is done so that in subsequent
chapters, you can see the areas in which Web services achieve
some aspects of a true SOA and other areas in which Web services
fall short. Before we analyze the details of SOA, it is
important to first explore the concept of software architecture,
which consists of the software’s coarse-grained structures.
Software architecture describes the system’s components and the
way they interact at a high level.