Chapter 6

Working with Software Components

In This Chapter

Creating true flexibility with components

Recapping the creation of Web services

Evolving from Web services to business services to business processes

Creating composite applications

Dismantling application silos

“Okay, if SOA’s so wonderful, what’s the catch?” you shrewdly ask. Like a lot of things worth having, SOA takes work and time, but it’s really worth it. SOA represents a new world order in which business leadership and technology leadership together navigate the business challenges of the “All Technology, All the Time” era we inhabit.

If you want to be a part of this new world order, you have to have some fluency in the basic concepts. That’s why we’re here — to help you with those basic concepts. If you can remember back in the 1970s, you might not have known what e-mail was, and you had never surfed the Web. For businesses everywhere, the concepts we’re introducing now are every bit as revolutionary and important as the Internet was in the 1980s, and we have confidence that when you’re through with us (or vice versa), you’ll be no dummy.

Components and Component Wannabes

Traditional software applications aren’t very flexible. It’s the sad truth. To be flexible requires advanced planning and some hard work. Flexible software is best built from reusable pieces of software code known as components. Well-written components can be used over and over again in different ways to form different applications.

The difference ...

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