Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Topic Description: Introduction of the historical problems of systems not being able to talk to one-another, the costs of change, heterogeneous technologies, attempts to solve the problem (RPC, CORBA, DCOM, RMI), and the impact of XML, it being self-describing and self-validating, the advent of SOAP, its growing ubiquity and concluding with its meaning in the enterprise, including synchronous (XML-RPC) and async (message queuing) operation and the role of enterprise application integration (EAI). It is part history lesson, part high-level technology analysis and part conclusion-drawing.