If you ask a CIO or a product manager what architecture they use, it is likely that you will get an answer like, “We use J2EE” or “We are a .Net shop”. These architectures are platform architectures. Participants in platform architectures typically include: a VM or interpreter and a set of libraries:

• Database access (JDBC, ADO)
• Directory access (JNDI, Active Directories)
• Remote Invocation (RMI, Remoting)
• Collections
• Etc.

They provide the foundation for developing applications and integrating them together. However, to date, most of the platform architectures have placed more emphasis on integration within the platform rather than across platforms.

In 2002, this trend began to change and platform architectures began releasing service-oriented features for platform-to-platform integration. This includes JAX-RPC, JAXM and .Net Remoting with SOAP as the protocol. Many of the platform architectures now utilize API’s to wrap the vendor neutral protocols and interfaces introduced in the SOE.