Abstract
Service orientation and service-oriented architecture (SOA) can be implemented in different ways. The paper discusses integration of applications for such systems ? even in the case of systems having applications operating in batch mode.
It seems that the proposed way of integration is suitable for the support of business processes as well. It is shown that it is advantageous to use data store (DS) services encapsulating data stores.
DS can be used to support complex variants of communication protocols and for virtualizing data access. DS can be used to bypass the need to use a central service in business process control.
Central services are alien elements in SOA. Together with DS there are discussed also other types of services supporting SOA as front-end gates and process managers.
It is shown that all these service types can be understand as variants of a service implementing generalized Petri places.