Service Oriented Architecture Fundamentals

Introduction

SOA is an architecture approach for defining, linking, and integrating reusable business services that have clear boundaries and are self-contained with their own functionalities. Within this type of architecture, you can orchestrate the business services in business processes. Adopting the concept of services—a higher-level abstraction that's independent of application or infrastructure IT platform and of context or other services.

Overview

A basic SOA architecture is composed of a service provider, service, and an optional service directory. Application-to-application messaging is used in the information exchange.

v  First the service provider creates a service and decides to expose it and publish it.

v  Publishing is done by posting the service information on the service directory.

v  On the other side, a service requester, in need of a certain service, searches the service directory for one that meets the necessary criteria.

v  Upon finding one and using the information available on the service directory, the service requester is able to directly contact the service provider in the correct way to fulfill the business need.

The following three fundamental aspects are part and parcel of SOA:

Ø  Service: A repeatable business task (such as checking customer credit or opening a new account)

Ø  Service orientation: A way of thinking about your business through linked services and the outcomes they provide

Ø  SOA: A business-centric architectural approach based on service-oriented principles

Certain design principles have been associated with SOA:

✓ Standardized service contracts

✓ Loose coupling

✓ Service abstraction

✓ Service reusability

✓ Service autonomy

✓ Service statelessness

✓ Service discoverability

✓ Service composability

Conclusion

In this article examined the fundamentals of SOA and basic SOA architecture. We have learnt some of the fundamental aspects and design principles. 

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