Benefits of SOA: Evaluation of an implemented scenario against alternative architectures

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is based on a design principle for business software systems. The SOA movement has taken up momentum, especially because of widespread middleware vendor support, e.g. by IBM, HP, BEA, Microsoft, Sun, Software AG, TIBCO, Oracle, SAP and others. Still answers to questions of how the target architecture should look like and what the advantages over other architectures are remain open. We have implemented a scenario based on free software, which consists of a well-defined service-oriented target architecture. In this article, we compare the used service-oriented approach with other state-of-the art architectures to show that changeability and efficiency improve compared to alternative architectures.