SOA is a concept which was introduced in late 1996 and now it’s a fully-fledged concept in enterprise application development. However this blog post is mainly focus on technical people who are new to Service Oriented Architecture. Firstly let’s start as a beginner and then discuss about more advance topics in the coming posts.
Will start our discussion by concentrating on the three words which makeup the SOA; Service, Service Orientation and Service Oriented Architecture.
Service
In software application world service is small to large scale unit which contains a solution for a business problem. In SOA, web services are the main component that we relate as a service. However we need to keep in mind that web service is not the only service we consider in SOA. As explained above it can be in any form.
In SOA we can describe service as a collection of capabilities. Service will expose functionality of an application without a user interface, so it can be utilized by other applications / components.
Service Orientation
The word Orientation means coordination or positioning. So when we take the service orientation, it’s a design model that derived from establish design practices and technology platforms which coordinate / position services to provide solutions for large business problems. Service orientation is a vendor and technology natural model.
Service Oriented Architecture
We have services which have some set of capabilities that can be used by applications. Also we have a well define design model that define on how those services can be coordinate with each service / application. Hence SOA is the architecture that result from the applying service orientation.
Now we know how SOA is derived. Therefore, let’s discuss on how we can adopt to Service Orientation design model in the next post.
References
- http://serviceorientation.com/whatissoa/fundamental_design_terminology_and_concepts
- Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): Concepts, Technology, and Design by Thomas Erl
- Next Generation SOA: A Concise Introduction to Service Technology & Service-Orientation by Leo Shuster; Thomas Erl; Clemens Utschig; Hajo Normann; Bernd Trops; Berthold Maier; Clive Gee; Pethuru Chelliah; Jürgen Kress
