Abstract
•Overview of Service Oriented Architecture, Web technologies & open source software.•Requirements capture of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) computer system.•Comparative analysis of open source vs. proprietary SOA for large scale systems.•SOA technical functional and non-functional requirements.•SOA evaluation criteria, recommendations and future research directions.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) integrates information systems towards an agile and reusable service-based connectivity. It is an approach amalgamating large scale private/public computer systems and other resources with continuous phenomenal advent evolution and leveraging of the World Wide Web (WWW, commonly referred to as the Web) social media, mobile communications, Big Data (BD), data analytics, Machine Learning (ML) based optimisation, Cloud Computing (CC) and Internet of Things (IoT), commonly known as Advanced Technologies (AT). Implementing SOA, whether Open Source Software (OSS) or proprietary or absolute freeware is a choice to be made which depends on the organisation's requirements in light of AT as well as a host of delivery and security concerns. In this paper, a comparative analysis of an open source vs. proprietary SOA for large scale computer systems servicing AT is presented by examining their main efficacies, features, advantages and disadvantages and capturing their generic technical functional and non-functional requirements in a unified manner. Furthermore, the SOA evaluation criteria, recommendations and conclusions are also presented.