Service‑Oriented Programming (SOP) is emerging as a new paradigm driven by networking technology and the need for rapid, powerful capabilities, but fragmentation across languages and platforms hampers large‑scale adoption. The paper aims to identify the key characteristics and patterns of SOP and demonstrate its value to developers and end users. It analyzes Service‑Oriented technologies to uncover these characteristics and patterns.
A new programming paradigm is forming throughout the software industry. This paradigm is driven by the exploitation of networking technology and the need to be able to create more powerful capabilities more quickly. The diversity in languages, middleware, and platforms has prevented larger constructs from being formed and the shortage of qualified software engineers only aggravates the problem. The inception of the Service-Oriented Programming (SOP) paradigm is being defined throughout the industry including: Sun’s JiniTM, OpenwingsTM, Microsoft’s. NETTM, and HP’s CoolTownTM. Much like the early days of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), certain characteristics of SOP are covered by some implementations, but no one approach covers all of them. Until the key features of OOP (encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism) and a design methodology (OOA/OOD) had been defined, consistency in OOP programming models was not achieved. This paper analyzes Service-Oriented technologies to identify the key characteristics and patterns of SOP, and demonstrates the value of SOP to developers and end users.