SOA, Web services, Indigo Confusion Isolated?
As I try to define Indigo for Webopedia, I'm becoming confused by how the concepts that are used to describe it relate to each other. I think, however, I've isolated the source of the confusion.
According to MSDN's Indigo page, “It is a new breed of communications infrastructure built around the Web services architecture.”
Then the Indigo FAQ only answers questions about service orientation.
Therefore, it is natural to associate service orientation with Web services; however, whenever the two are mentioned in the same breath, architects caution that SO and Web services are separate. That SO is independent of specific technologies:
According to Rich Turner in his On the road to Indigo blog, “It is VITALLY important that we don't associate SO with SOAP or XML or any particular wire protocol - SO is separate and distinct from ANY particular technology and should provide us the principles we base our future system designs upon.“
I then read (and reread) the transcript for the .NET show with John Shewchuk. In it he basically said, Indigo is an SOA environment that contains a message processing engine and a set of libraries that contain Web services capabilities.
So, is Indigo an SOA environment or is it actually an SOA environment specific to Web services?
It seems an SOA environment specific to any technology is kind of an oxymoron, so does this mean Indigo will be able to support any and all future service technologies?
Please let me know if I'm missing something here.
Thanks!