Service-oriented architecture

A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a collection of services that communicate with each other, for example, passing data from one service to another or coordinating an activity between one or more services.

Companies want to integrate existing systems to implement Information Technology (IT) support for business processes that cover the entire business value chain. A variety of designs are used, ranging from rigid point-to-point electronic data interchange (EDI) to web auctions. By using the Internet, companies can make their IT systems available to internal departments or external customers, but the interactions are not flexible and are without standardized architecture.

Because of this increasing demand for technologies that support connecting and sharing resources and data, a need exists for a flexible, standardized architecture. SOA is a flexible architecture that unifies business processes by structuring large applications into building blocks, or small modular functional units or services, for different groups of people to use inside and outside the company. The building blocks can be one of three roles: service provider, service broker, or service requestor. See Web services approach to a service-oriented architecture to learn more about these roles.

Requirements for an SOA:

To efficiently use an SOA, follow these requirements:

• Interoperability between different systems and programming languages.

  The most important basis for a simple integration between applications on different platforms is to provide a communication protocol. This protocol is available for most systems and programming languages.

• Clear and unambiguous description language.

  To use a service offered by a provider, it is not only necessary to be able to access the provider system, but the syntax of the service interface must also be clearly defined in a platform-independent fashion.

• Retrieval of the service.

  To support a convenient integration at design time or even system run time, a search mechanism is required to retrieve suitable services. Classify these services as computer-accessible, hierarchical or taxonomies based on what the services in each category do and how they can be invoked.

Subtopics

• Web services approach to a service-oriented architecture
  Use web services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment.
• Web services business models supported in SOA
  This article explains the concept and business models that can be implemented using web services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA).