SOA and Platform Independence

Quite often I hear platform independence as not only a key benefit of SOA, but a defining characteristic. Let me begin by saying this is simply not the case. Platform independence in the context of SOA has two connotations:

1. Services can be hosted on any platform (Windows, Linux, .NET, Java, etc)
2. Services are interoperable regardless of the platforms on which they are hosted

Firstly, let us examine what a service is from a technical standpoint. A service is an autonomous coarse grained unit of logic which external parties can communicate by way of exchanging explicitly defined messages via its endpoints. The messages and endpoints are described by the service contract. Consumers must conform to policies stipulated by a service provider in order to consume the service.

Based on the above definition, any platform that can host a process that can exchange messages over a network is capable of hosting a service. This is not a miracle of SOA, it is simply the miracle of distributed computing which was around long before the emergence of SOA.

The second thing to note about the above definition is that it does not mandate any specific transport or encoding of messages. Messages do not have to be encoded in XML. They do not have to be transported over HTTP. Service contracts do not have to be specified in WSDL. Services do not have to be natively interoperable.

Now it is true that Web service technologies greatly improve service interoperability between platforms. But services in our SOA do not have to be Web services. Even Web services by today's definition do not mandate that messages are transported over HTTP. It is quite acceptable for a Web service to be exposed over a JMS or MSMQ transport. JMS and MSMQ are not natively interoperable.

It is also true that an intermediary such as an ESB can provide protocol translation which can make services that exchange messages with incompatible transports and encodings interoperable. But again, an ESB is not a prerequisite for SOA.

I guess the commonly held view that SOA and platform independence go hand in hand has emerged from the association between SOA and Web services. But once again just to set the record straight, SOA does not mandate platform independence.

SOA does however mandate that implementation details of a service are encapsulated behind the service contract. As such, SOA certainly makes platform independence easier to achieve. We just need to overcome any incompatibilities in message transport and encoding.