Brad Appleton gives a nice introduction to what and how patterns entered into software development. Most of the sources online and elsewhere point to the 1987 technical report wrote by Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham to be the first published work on application of patterns for software systems. Later in 1997, Norman Kerth and Ward Cunningham wrote how patterns could be used to improve architectural vision of a software system. GoF book contains widely used patterns that occur during designing of software.
SOA patterns is a set of patterns that you’ll likely to encounter when implementing a service oriented architecture in an organization. Sometimes a product that you might be using will not be able to customize according to a well defined pattern. If you have to resort out to non standard communication mechanisms or have to alter your architecture to match what the product can do, then you shouldn’t be using that product to begin with. Cost of making a change later to accommodate a business need might be too high in such a scenario. I’ll be exploring how to configure open source software products to implement some of the well defined SOA patterns in coming posts.