Introduction
SOP inherently promotes service oriented architecture (SOA), however, it is not the same as SOA. While SOA focuses on communication between systems using "services", SOP provides a new technique to build agile application modules using in-memory services as the unit of work.
An in-memory service in SOP can be transparently externalized as a web service operation. Due to language and platform independent Web Service standards, SOP embraces all existing programming paradigms, languages and platforms. In SOP, the design of the programs pivot around the semantics of service calls, logical routing and data flow description across well-defined service interfaces. All SOP program modules are encapsulated as services and a service can be composed of other nested services in a hierarchical manner with virtually limitless depth to this service stack hierarchy. A composite service can also contain programming constructs some of which are specific and unique to SOP. A service can be an externalized component from another system accessed either through using web service standards or any proprietary API through an in-memory plug-in mechanism.
While SOP supports the basic programming constructs for sequencing, selection and iteration, it is differentiated with a slew of new programming constructs that provide built-in native ability geared towards data list manipulation, data integration, automated multithreading of service modules, declarative context management and synchronization of services. SOP design enables programmers to semantically synchronize the execution of services in order to guarantee that it is correct, or to declare a service module as a transaction boundary with automated commit/rollback behavior.
Semantic design tools and runtime automation platforms can be built to support the fundamental concepts of SOP. For example, a service virtual machine (SVM) that automatically creates service objects as units of work and manages their context can be designed to run based on the SOP program metadata stored in XML and created by a design-time automation tool. In SOA terms, the SVM is both a service producer and a service consumer.
Read more about this topic: Service-oriented Programming
Famous quotes containing the word introduction:
“Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men are still and always young in this respect.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For better or worse, stepparenting is self-conscious parenting. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”
—Anonymous Parent. Making It as a Stepparent, by Claire Berman, introduction (1980, repr. 1986)
“We used chamber-pots a good deal.... My mother ... loved to repeat: “When did the queen reign over China?” This whimsical and harmless scatological pun was my first introduction to the wonderful world of verbal transformations, and also a first perception that a joke need not be funny to give pleasure.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)