SOA [Service Oriented Architecture]

SOA [Service oriented architecture]

From OOA to SOA, computing and development approach of software services are changing rapidly.

Why SOA ??

SOA is based on a mesh of software services. Services comprise unassociated, loosely coupled units of functionality that have no calls to each other embedded in them. Every service implements one action like viewing bank-statement etc.

Instead of using service embedding calls to each other in the source code, they use certain protocols which describe how the services can pass and parse messages using the descriptive metadata.

            Basically, SOA is an architecture for loosely coupled distributed applications. In-fact SOA is a collection of many services via a network. Nowadays SOA is based on web services. [Key terms: Services, Connections]

Services: Service is a well-defined function, that does not depend on other states or other services

Connections: It is a link connecting the self-contained distributed services with one another.

                                                            Fig. 1

                                                           

Let’s say we 2 software Service consumer(1) & Service Provider(2), and they want to communicate with each other. Service Consumer(1) sends a request to Service Provider(2) for communication. When a request is received by Service Provider(2), it is processed by a service [Ref. services def. above]. But, the consumer has to know how to call the service and what output should be expected.

SOA is basically to communicate between 2 software. How do humans communicate? Language right! How does human interact with Computer?? Via keyboard, mouse etc. In the same way, if 2 software wants to communicate to each other they need a service i.e. nothing but SOA.

Note: Web-service is an implementation of SOA.