The service flow project tools provide an environment for transforming critical applications for use in a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
The service flow project tools consist of a single set of core components that provide a pluggable framework, which allows for multiple code generators to support a variety of runtime environments (shown in Figure 1).

Prior to the common environment approach of the service flow project tools, you might have had to use multiple tools to address the requirements of the environment on which your service would run.
The benefit of a common tool is realized when you need to make updates to the application for which you have created a service. Without a common tool you would have to update in multiple places and in multiple formats, while using multiple tools.
