Service-Oriented Architecture, Web Services, XML and Higher Education

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services are now making a tremendous impact on the computing world. Many large enterprises, including universities, are using SOA and Web Services to integrate their legacy systems to provide a single unified "Point of data" for users. This paper presents a brief introduction to these exciting technologies, and discusses their impacts on higher education. To make the concepts in this paper concrete, they use a Microsoft Visual Basic .NET example to demonstrate the relationships among SOA, Web Services, and XML and show the XML messages exchanged by various entities in a SOA environment.