Introduction to SOA

Written by David Propst

Thursday, 11 January 2007

The use of amalgamated technologies and applications in corporations is a reality. At a time when resources are scarce, IT departments simply cannot scrap existing applications; rather, they must leverage their existing investments. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is popular because it lets you reuse applications and it promises interoperability between applications and technologies. This is about the time one arrives to: "What is SOA, anyway?" The concept of a service is nothing new to the IT world.  However, the notion of SOA has evolved rapidly over the past years.  It's an architectural style of building software applications that promotes loose coupling between components so that you can reuse them dynamically.  It's a new way of building applications with the following distinctive characteristics:  - Services are software components that have published contracts / interfaces.  These services are platform-, language-, and operating-system-independant.  XML and the Simple Object Access Protocall(SOAP) are the enabling technologies for SOA, since they're platform-independant standards.  - Consumers can dynamically discover services.  - Services are interoperable. The basic building block of SOA is the service. A service is a self-contained software module that performs a predetermined task: "verify a customer's credit history," for example. Services are software components that don't require developers to use a specific underlying technology.  Another key advantage of SOA is that it allows you to automate business-process management.  Business processes may consume and orchestrate these services to achieve the desired functionality. Why would you use SOA, though?  Today's IT organizations invariably employ disparate systems and technologies.  Most analysts predict that J2EE and .NET will continue to coexist in most organizations and the trent of having heterogeneous technologies in IT departments will continue.  Moveover, creating applications that leverage these different technologies is at the moment, a daunting task.  SOA provides a clear solution to those application integration woes by allowing systems to expose their functionality via standarized, interoperable interfaces. Using SOA offers several key advantages.  You can:  - Adapt applications to changing technologies.  - Easily integrate applications with other systems.  - Quickly and easily create a business process from existing services and resources.

Last Updated ( Saturday, 13 January 2007 )

 

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