Taking Business Logic to the Next Level with SOA
Coding business logic is the only way to satisfy business requirements in information technology (IT), and businesses have been doing so for decades, albeit with limited success. The fundamental problem with business logic has been its inflexibility–business needs change, and the logic can’t keep up.
While there have been modest flexibility improvements since the days when all application functionality resided on the same system, the unfortunate truth is that these advances have been little more than a business logic shell game, moving the hard-coded logic from one system to another. Instead of solving the problem, businesses are in the habit of creating instant legacy code all over their infrastructure.
Today’s business requires more flexibility from its IT, and fortunately, IT has a new approach to distributed computing that promises the business agility that companies crave. That solution is Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA is an approach to distributed computing that represents business logic as Services on the network. People can then compose these Services into flexible business processes that provide the business agility so necessary in today’s demanding business environment.