Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are currently attracting a lot of attention in industry as the latest conceptual tool for managing large enterprise computing infrastructures. SOA is interesting from a research perspective for a variety of reasons. From the software engineering side, because it shifts the focus away from conventional programming to application integration, thereby challenging many of the premises around improving development by improving programming languages. From the middleware point of view, SOA emphasizes asynchronous interaction, away from the RPC/RMI model, and thus brings to the fore many of the inadequacies of existing software and hardware platforms. From the formal specification perspective, however, SOA offers many opportunities as one of the key ideas behind SOA is the notion of capturing the interactions at a high level and letting the underlying infrastructure take care of the implementation details. For instance, the emphasis in SOA is the main reason why workflow and business process technologies are experiencing a new revival, as they are seen as a way to formally specify complex interaction patterns. This presentation covers the main ideas behind SOA and why they are an excellent basis to provide a more formal basis for the development and evolution of complex systems.
