Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services:

INTRODUCTION

Most enterprises have made extensive investments in system resources over the course of
many years. Such enterprises have an enormous amount of data stored in legacy
enterprise information systems (EIS), so it's not practical to discard existing systems. It's
more cost-effective to evolve and enhance EIS. But how can this be done? Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a cost-effective solution.

Sun defined SOA Jini which is an environment for dynamic discovery and use of
services over a network. Web services have taken the concept of services introduced by
Jini technology and implemented it as services delivered over the web using technologies
such as XML, Web Services Description Language (WSDL), Simple Object Access
Protocol (SOAP), and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration(UDDI). SOA is
emerging as the premier integration and architecture framework in today's complex and
heterogeneous computing environment. Previous attempts didn't enable open
interoperable solutions, but relied on proprietary APIs and required a high degree of
coordination between groups. SOA can help organizations streamline processes so that
they can do business more efficiently, and adapt to changing needs and competition,
enabling the software as a service concept.

Service-Oriented Architecture

SOA is an architectural style for building software applications that use services available
in a network such as the web. It promotes loose coupling between software components
so that they can be reused. Applications in SOA are built based on services. A service is
an implementation of a well-defined business functionality, and such services can then be
consumed by clients in different applications or business processes.

SOA allows for the reuse of existing assets where new services can be created from an
existing IT infrastructure of systems. In other words, it enables businesses to leverage
existing investments by allowing them to reuse existing applications, and promises
interoperability between heterogeneous applications and technologies. SOA provides a
level of flexibility that wasn't possible before in the sense that:

• Services are software components with well-defined interfaces that are

implementation-independent. An important aspect of SOA is the separation of the
service interface (the what) from its implementation (the how). Such services are
consumed by clients that are not concerned with how these services will execute
their requests.
• Services are self-contained (perform predetermined tasks) and loosely coupled
(for independence)
• Services can be dynamically discovered
• Composite services can be built from aggregates of other services

REFERNCES

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/WebServices/soa/

www.service-architecture.com/web-services/.../service-
oriented_architecture_soa_definition.html

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