Why We Should Know About Service Oriented Architecture (Soa)?

Why We Should Know About Service Oriented Architecture (Soa)?

Service Oriented Architecture or SOA is an approach to provide integrated distributed applications for large-scale IT environment. There are many companies and organizations with the large computing environments that contain several huge and expensive legacy applications which are not able to support new business requirements. They plan to increase the speed of their services and introduce new products to the costumers and have more cooperation with other companies and partners in order to provide new business lines. But, they don’t know what approach they can use to achieve such IT system. It is very difficult to develop new application for large-scale computing system from scratch where there are various legacy applications and old systems that have been working for several years. In this situation, SOA can be used as an adequate paradigm to alleviate this problem. In an SOA environment, existing applications and services can be integrated to complete a new specific business process. With SOA, companies’ applications and data can be shared with other companies, organizations, and even costumers in order to lessen the burden of the cost and time of developing.

According to IBM SOA Center of Excellence, SOA is defined: “Service Oriented Architecture is an enterprise-scale IT architecture for linking resources on demand. These resources are represented as business-aligned services which can contribute and be composed in a value-net, enterprise, or line of business to complete business needs. The major structuring element for SOA applications is a service as contrast to subsystems, systems, or components”

Service Oriented architecture (SOA) cannot be purchased in the market and it is more than an architectural paradigm which is able to cover technology, practices, and methodology.

As a matter of fact, the business logic of applications or individual functions in an SOA environment are exposed as Web services to the public or partners. Web Services are able to perform the interoperable interaction between enterprises network nodes. The interface of web service is defined as Web service Definition Language (WSDL) which is a standard to describe Web service specifications. The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is used as a XML messages based protocol to support communication between services. In the SOA environment, Services are stored in a registry that uses the Universal Description, Definition, and Integration (UDDI) standard to look up and invoke requested services by service consumer. The interfaces of the SOA services are independent of their implementation due to the loosely coupled nature of them. The new business process can be simply created by composing two or more services without considering the services’ underlying implementations of those services. Each web Services has a Qos ally with it. The Quality of services (QoS) refers to aspects such as availability, accessibility, integrity, performance, reliability, regulatory, and security.

Consequently, developers and companies can use SOA approach to provide a flexible, reusable, and interoperable IT environment and boost their ability to maintain and extending applications in future.