Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a flexible set of design principles used during the phases of systems development and integration. Upon deployment, an SOA-based architecture will provide a loosely-integrated suite of services that can be used within multiple business domains. SOA also generally provides a way for consumers of services, such as web-based applications, to be aware of available SOA-based services. For example, several disparate departments within a company may develop and deploy SOA services in different implementation languages, and their respective clients use a well understood, well defined interface to access them. XML is commonly used for interfacing with SOA services, though this is not required. It has been becoming one of the most widely used methodologies for building and integrating different types of software applications. This because the extreme benefits that it offers to their adopters including agility, dynamicity, and loose-coupling. These benefits are usually missed in traditional software terminologies and practices. XML Web Services is the most used technology for realizing SOA because it is easy to use. Furthermore, it allows high interoperability between different systems due to its dependency on standards that are widely accepted and supported by almost all large software vendors. However, XML Web Services suffers from a number of drawbacks such as low performance, bad utilization of hardware resources, and high network latency. These pitfalls may prevent some adopters from utilizing SOA in large and complex systems. Therefore, these issues should be first addressed and resolved before leveraging it into real-time systems. In this paper, an experimental evaluation for the performance of XML Web Services in real-time business systems is presented. In addition, this study offers some tactics and strategies that might be used to enhance the overall performance of XML Web Services. Furthermore, web service development as well as design analysis, modeling, and methodologies are presented. Moreover, the management and security of SOA are discussed.
