I attended Beat Schwegler’s session, “The Grey Area between Service and Object-Oriented Design,” during Tech Ed 2005. I must say it was one of the best sessions (IMO) at Tech Ed. At the beginning of the session, Beat defined SOA. At the time I was kicking myself for not writing it down. Luckily, I found the definition on his blog:
“In short, SOA is about loosely coupled systems, message based communication and business process orchestration. As an abstract architectural model, it acts as an indirection between the business and the technology model. Web Services are the preferred implementation technology for loosely coupled and inter-operable systems.” – Beat Schwegler
ToDo: Memorize his definition and learn to pronounce his last name.
Over the past few months, I have been learning more and more about BizTalk Server 2004. Those who know me are probably getting tired of hearing me talk about BTS.
In my opinion, BizTalk Server is Microsoft’s SOA platform because it is a message-oriented runtime that allows you to develop loosely coupled systems by graphically abstracting business processes as well as orchestrating the messages between those processes and systems. In addition, BTS provides Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) for analysing processes, Human Work-flow Systems (HWS) for integrating the human aspect of processes, a Business Rules Engine (BRE) and native support for Web Services.