Level: Introductory

Arun Chhatpar (arunchhatpar@gmail.com), Software Architect, Freelance

27 May 2008

The widespread acceptance of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) proves that enterprises have realized the promise of this technology. That promise of increased agility comes from a basic software design principle: loose coupling. SOA allows for business functions to be exposed as independent services. Web services, which is one way to implement SOA, makes any business functionality available over the Internet. Another technology that promises to extend that agility to business users is business rules management (BRM) systems. A BRM gives business users direct control over the business logic, allowing them to change it without much intervention from IT. This article explores how these two technologies—SOA and BRM—promise to help businesses respond more quickly and cost effectively to changing market conditions.

Ever-changing market conditions are driving the need for increased business agility, which in turn requires rapid implementation of changes to business logic across the enterprise. SOA has proven to be a great technology to make enterprises more agile. With their ability to separate business logic from its implementation, BRM systems are adding more fuel to the fire started by the SOA revolution. In this article, you will learn about business processes, which are composed of numerous business rules, and about exposing these processes as services. This article takes an example from the financial business world and shows how SOA and a BRM system can be used in conjunction to get the best of both worlds.

SOA overview

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