Service Oriented Architecture : SOA 2.0 Introduction Conceptualizing Service Oriented Architecture Let us take a look at some of the key features of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The best way to go about doing this is to break SOA down in to its core verbal elements. We’ll start with the last letter first: A. We will first examine architecture in reference to SOA. Usually, in the realm of software, architecture tends to define the overall intercommunication of different high-level components. To put it simply, this is how a solution is broken down into logical units – and how they will…

Service Oriented Architecture : Why SOA? The vast majority of businesses working in the field of Information Technology in this day and age find themselves having to justify their projects with a return on their investments. This puts Information Technology, as a field, under an enormous amount of pressure. IT must boast requirements that are increasingly responsive and flexible to the shifting needs of different businesses. Firms dealing with Information Technology must also be able to face the challenge of taking on an array of software systems that may or may not be compatible with one another. What is more,…

SOA 2.0 Event Driven Architecture There has been much negative press in recent years in regards to Oracle’s touting of SOA 2.0 as the next generation version of SOA. Its combination of Event Driven Architecture with SOA considers the first iteration of SOA to be a mere client-server drive. Despite the fact that it has been presented as a new term, a lot of critics claim that what this merger actually is an advanced SOA, rather than a 2.0 version. The truth is that a lot of pure play middleware vendors such as webMethods have had 2.0 attributes for many…

SOA Advantages Businesses in today’s competitive environment are constantly faced with the challenge of having to provide more with fewer resources. Businesses are constantly under pressure to deliver goods and services to the market at a faster, cheaper rate – and at higher quality than in previous times. It is predicted that investments in Information Technology are going to drive businesses forward – not merely in terms of gaining responsiveness and efficiencies, but additionally in the creation of top line opportunities. It is an ironic fact that the vast majority of corporate Information Technology companies only allocate about three quarters…

SOA Disadvantages Service Oriented Architecture Disadvantages & Applicability Service Oriented Architecture may not always be the best architectural choice because optimal utilization of SOA requires additional development and design attempts as well as infrastructure which translates into costs escalation.  When it comes to applications, Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture is not recommend for the following: Stand alone, non distributed applications that do not necessitate application or component integration; that would include, for instance, a word processing application that does not require request and response based calls. . Short lived applications or applications that are in any way limited in…

SOA Standards In this article, you will learn about latest standards for Service Oriented Architecture, and in particular, how it relates to Oracle, in today’s competitive world. SOA of the Next Generation In this day and age, enterprise applications have already begun the transition from user interface driven applications to assemblies of interoperable services that are also reusable. Such services are representative of the easy business functions that are intended to be assembled together in to the form of new applications. One of the main advantages of such a change in application architecture is that services can now be reused in the…

SOA Architecture It is essential for the Businesses to think a lot more seriously about how best to assemble their systems out of common parts. It requires a lot more planning and investment at the outset, but it also enables Businesses to build faster systems in the long run as the inventory of reusable parts grows at a frantic pace. In such programs, systems tend to be composed of reusable elements, which are referred to as services. A service can be thought of as a software building block that performs a specific function. These functions are performed via interfaces, which…

SOA Concepts Today, the concept of Service Oriented Architecture has become ubiquitous. Evidence from recent years establish that SOA is not just about hype, but a part of every major Business environment. The truth is, Service Oriented Architecture can be beneficial to Business only when it is utilized properly. Service Oriented Architecture is no longer a theory – it has moved into the realm of actual initiatives that can ensure that Businesses and investors receive high returns on their investments. It is vital to possess a keen understanding of various Service Oriented Architecture concepts in order to decide whether Service…

SOA Future SOA: The Past It is often asked as to why haven’t people been using SOA for the last twenty years? As far as SOA is concerned, in order to build a system out of parts, you require a standard method of representing software parts. If no such standard exists, then building such a system can become incredibly difficult.   Though Service Oriented Architecture is not exactly a new thing, Businesses have spent the last fifteen years trying to come up with a set standard. While CORBA and DCOM have been in existence for a while, they never became…

SOA Principles In this SOA article, we will focus on some of the core principles of Service Oriented Architecture viz service abstraction, service reusability, service composability, service autonomy, service optimization, service discoverability, service-orientation and interoperability, standardized service contract. Service Abstraction Abstraction is also known under its full name as service interface level abstraction. It is this principle that allows us to establish services as black boxes, hiding their underlying details from potential customers. Abstraction is achieved through a utilization of service contracts. Through limiting what is made public about a service to what is documented in the service contract, a…

SOA Industry Usage First time usage of SOA tends to highlight the need for semantic interoperability.  While SOA provides framework for integration of cross Business operations with information flow in real time, there is also a major semantic interoperability conflict that is not being addressed directly by the SOA. Thus, the usage of information repositories has been the inevitable result.  It must be said that the vast majority of implementers of SOA are still in the first, wrapping stage.  It would be great if we were in a period when legacy applications have been integrated. It is hoped that within…

SOA Best Practices Service Oriented Architecture is regarded as the key to improve efficiency of Information Technology. But in order to implement Service Oriented Architecture at a Business, one needs to have a lot more than just technical expertise. It is essential to hone skills in management practices. In this article, we will focus on the governance principles that have become widely regarded as the best practices in relation to Service Oriented Architecture. Today’s competitive environment has seen Information Technology chains and Businesses merging at an increasing rate. Service Oriented Architecture and enterprise architecture are spoken of as independent from…

SOA Definitions and Certification Service Oriented Architecture is a design that enables Business and computational resources to be linked together on demand as a means of achieving the results desired for service consumers – which may be end users or other services. Service Oriented Architecture has been defined by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards as a paradigmatic approach for the utilization and organization of distributed capabilities that might be under the control of conflicting ownership domains. Service Oriented Architecture provides a single means of offering, interacting, discovering and using different capabilities to produce the effects that…

SOA for Project Managers The idea of handling exceptions manually unveils major significance of individuals involved in Service Oriented Architecture based projects as well as various roles they take on. Service Oriented Architecture projects tends to involve a number of familiar project roles, including project management, Business analysis, architecture, development, security, and administration of systems and databases. At the same time, such roles were generally created for different purposes. A lot of these roles might have different meanings, depending on the views of the Business in question. In order to structure a Service Oriented Architecture project in the correct fashion,…

SOA for Developers Service Oriented Architecture is a structure that requires a number of specialized employees working in positions such as Object Librarian, Configuration Management, and Information Architect. Junior developers or individuals who prefer dealing with web development, focus exclusively on the presentation tier. Such individuals are very productive, as the vast majority of the business services and rules will be available to be assembled into the UI’s. Individuals who enjoy writing code can dwell in the business rules tier, where important services and components may be developed. More experienced developers will be able to construct enterprise wide services and…

SOA Job Opportunities New Jobs in SOA SOA need data center architect who is dedicated to overseeing computing, management, facilities, networking, and security, who is on the look out, thinking always at least ten years in advance of current trends and considering how modern day Service Oriented Architecture will affect power requirements in the future. Moving to a more centralized data center that utilize service oriented architecture; virtualization, as well as other new technologies should get Businesses to start thinking more in terms of extended job definitions for its Information Technology employees as well. One of the reasons why an…

SOA and Web Services A lot of individuals tend to associate Service Oriented Architecture with World Wide Web based services. The two, however, are not one and the same, and thus must be distinguished from one another. We will first begin by elucidating the concept of Service Oriented Architecture before moving on to Web services. For the moment, we are going to focus on Service Oriented Architecture in order to understand how it is distinct from Web based services. Then we will show how the two are in fact connected. When Object Oriented programming first began to get popular, C++…

Service Oriented Design and Development SOAD – Service Oriented Analysis and Design The term Service Oriented Analysis and Design was first used in the publication Elements of Service Oriented Analysis and Design. Service Oriented Analysis and Design is also covered in the publication Service Oriented Architecture Compass. Service Oriented Analysis and Design is a strategy that IBM created especially for Service Oriented Architecture. SOAD added innovations for service orchestration, the enterprise service bus, as well as service repositories. Moreover, it helps the construction, design, aggregation, and deployment of applications as web services based on UDDI, SOAP, and WSDL technology. Service Modeling…

SOA and Network Management Architecture In recent years, the field of Network Management has been absorbing the principles of Service Oriented Architecture. Examples of service oriented Network Management architectures include the TS 188 001 NGN Management OSS Architecture from ETSA, as well as the more recent M.3060 Principles for the Management of Next Generation Networks, which was a recommendation of the ITU-T Service Oriented Architecture. Some of the tools for the management of Service Oriented Architecture infrastructure include the HyPerformix IPS Performance Optimizer, the Total Software Intersperse, the HP Management Software / Mercury Service Oriented Architecture Manager, and the IBM…

SOA and Business Architecture Businesses are now having to think a lot more seriously about how to best assemble their systems out of common parts. Service Oriented Architecture has caused this change in the way such systems are thought of. It requires a lot more planning and investment at the outset, but it also enables Businesses to build faster systems in the long run as the inventory of reusable parts grows at a frantic pace. In such architectural programs, systems tend to be composed of reusable elements, which are referred to as services. A services can be thought of as…

Service Orientation and Interoperability In this article, we will take a look at the Service Oriented Architecture principles of service orientation and interoperability. Let’s start with service orientation first. Service orientation can be thought of as a design paradigm that is used to specify the creation of automation logic in the form of services. Service orientation is applied as a strategic goal in the development of Service Oriented Architecture. Like a lot of other design paradigms, service orientation should successfully provide a means of attaining a separation of concerns. The History of Service Orientation Principles The definition of service orientation…

Service Composability The principle of Service Oriented Architecture known as Service Composability can be broken up into two basic principles: Service Discoverability and Service Composition. When it comes to the realm of Service Design, a lot of attention is paid to the enabling of those characteristics that are so commonly associated with Service Oriented Architecture marketing – reuse and loose coupling. While these two aspects are undoubtedly vital, indeed critical to the attainment of long term Service Oriented Architecture transition projects, there is a lot more that should be taken into consideration. Though abstraction can be utilized to support the…

Service Abstraction One aspect of service orientation that is connected directly to loose coupling and service contracts is abstraction. Through abstraction, we are able to control the parts of the underlying service logic that are to be exposed to the external world. Through ensuring that such parts have been designed in a generic fashion as a means of accommodating numerous potential service requestors, the service may be positioned as a reusable Information Technology asset. In this article, we will take a look at different levels of abstraction before moving on to a discussion about how reuse may support Service Oriented…

Service Encapsulation What is Encapsulation? In the realm of computer networking, the term encapsulation is utilized to include data from an upper layer protocol in to a protocol on a lower layer. Such a method of abstraction through networking allows many different layers to add on functionality and features. The World Wide Web, for instance, is based on the Internet Protocol. The vast majority of applications utilize either the Transmission Control Protocol or the User Datagram Protocol. Thus, a lot of user data is then encapsulated in to the form of a UDP datagram, which is subsequently encapsulated in to…

Service Loose Coupling Loose coupling can be thought of as the resilient relationship that exists among two or more systems or companies that have some sort of relationship based on exchange. Each transactional end should make its requirements explicit somehow and make very few, if any, assumptions about the other end. While the notion of loose coupling originated in computer systems, Karl Weick later brought it in to organizational studies. Loose Coupling in Computing Loosely coupled computers systems are regarded as being useful in the event that either the destination or the source computing systems are subject to changes on…

Service Discoverability Service discovery protocols can be thought of as network protocols that allow for the automatic detection of both services and devices that are offered by a computer network’s various devices. There are a lot of service discovery protocols available. In this article, we will take a look at the attributes of three of the more popular ones – Service Location Protocol, Simple Service Discovery Protocol, and UDDI for Web Services. Before we proceed, we should point out that a Service Discovery Protocol should not be confused with a Session Description Protocol. The latter is used to describe multimedia…

Standardized Service Contract Standardized service contracts are one of the key Service Oriented Architecture principles. They ensure that services that are in the same inventory of services are kept in compliance with contract design standards. The services in a Service Oriented Architecture are able to delineate their capabilities and overall purpose in the form of a service contract. The standardized service contract principle basically requires that specific considerations be taken in to account when a service’s public technical interface is being designed. It simultaneously assesses the nature and quantity of content that shall be published as part of the service’s…

Service Reusability One of the most vital principles of Service Oriented Architecture is that of service reusability. And in today’s day and age, it can be said that we have been making a lot of progress towards improving both this central tenet and Service Oriented Architecture in general. One sign that a significant degree of progress in the field has been made is the fact that more and more questions regarding Service Oriented Architecture these days are aimed at the architecture itself, rather than infrastructure and implementation. One question that has come up in recent years is: Should all services…

Service Oriented Infrastructure Service Oriented Infrastructure is a systematic means for describing Information Technology infrastructures in the terms of a service. The underlying principles of Service Oriented Infrastructure revert back to LDAP and Mainframe technologies, among others. Where Service Oriented Infrastructure manages to distinguish itself is the way in which it provides a mindset or framework for making Business benefits measurable. Service Oriented Infrastructure tends to provide the foundation for Information Technology services. Intel initially developed the concept that had three different domains for Service Orientation; they were the Enterprise, the Infrastructure, and the application architecture. For now, we will…

Service Autonomy As Businesses continue to step up the process of constructing enterprise automation logic in the service format, there is also an increasing need to step up both the efficiency and reliability that the services are intended to take on at run time. This dire need is increased when it comes time to assemble a service inventory with a vast quantity of reusable services. Reusable Services and Concurrency Service Oriented Architecture entails reuse to the extent that many strategic goals that are associated with enterprise wide Service Oriented Architecture transitions are linked directly to the success of achieving repeated…