The Oasis standards consortium has approved the first
version of a
reference model for SOA, with the aim of defining what the term
means
in a technical sense for developers and architects.
The technical committee that worked on the reference model
described it
as “an abstract framework for understanding significant entities
and
relationships between them within a service-oriented environment,
and
for the development of consistent standards or specifications
supporting
that environment”.
But it points out that the model is not “directly tied to any
standards,
technologies or other concrete implementation details” as its goal
is to
provide “common semantics that can be used unambiguously across and
between
different implementations”. This means that it has been designed to
help
enterprise architects co-ordinate separate SOA projects across
their
organisation.
Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink, warned, however,
that
because the model was abstract, it offered only an overall
framework for
planning an enterprise SOA initiative rather than real-world
implementation
advice.
But Oasis has also been busy elsewhere approving version 1.3 of
the Web
Services-Notification document as a standard too. WS-Notification
defines
a pattern-based approach to passing information between web
services to
standardise the way that events take place. It describes a publish
and
subscribe event mechanism that can be used by higher-level
management
protocols such as Oasis’ Web Services Distributed Management
standard.