Service-oriented architecture (SOA)
In a service-oriented architecture, applications are made up of loosely coupled software services, which interact to provide all the functionality needed by the application. Each service is generally designed to be very self-contained and stateless to simplify the communication that takes place between them.
There are three main roles involved in a service-oriented architecture:
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| Service provider |
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| Service broker |
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| Service requester |
The interactions between these roles are shown in Figure | 8-1.
Figure 18-1 Service-oriented architecture
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