Towards Service Architectures in Service-oriented Computing

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are nowadays a widely promoted field of study in service-oriented computing (SOC) but unfortunately often discussed only in the light of enterprise IT solutions and the Web services technologies. By diving into the technical fundamentals of SOA we found a more general concept of service architectures; a concept that might have much more application possibilities than its near relative, SOA. This paper presents a simple but feasible model for service architectures, based on the existing state-of-the-art research of SOC. Feasibility of some existing service platforms as service architecture realizations is evaluated against the model. The simple model provides a good starting point for researching and developing more sophisticated service architectures and a set of criteria for evaluating service platforms.