12. Trends

12.1 Service Oriented Architecture

The most important theme in modern application development is service-oriented architecture (SOA). The concept has been around since the 1990s, and was pioneered by the Open Software Foundation (OSF), Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), Object Management Group (OMG) and CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), but SOA became popular at the same time as Web services.

As developers wrote increasingly complex code, they sought to reuse it. The notion of modular design was introduced, followed by component-based software. However, these improvements were not sufficient to manage distributed applications, application integration, the diversity of platforms and protocols, the Internet, and so on. SOA eliminates...