Slide Objective: “SOA” is a concept that is viewed differently by various people depending on their roles in the organization. The Enterprise Architect, however, must view SOA across all these perspectives and provide the expertise and knowledge that allows these perspectives to bridge cohesively for the good of the business.
Details: The most important characteristic of SOA is the flexibility to treat elements of business processes and the underlying IT infrastructure as secure, standardized components (services) that can be reused and combined to address changing business priorities.
An Service Oriented Architecture includes all these aspects:
An architectural style and a design principle for application development and integration.
A way of designing software systems to provide “services” to end-user applications or to other services.
A natural evolutionary step to the object-oriented (OO), procedural, and data-centric approaches adopted for solution implementation till now. When creating an SOA system, individual services are typically implemented using one or more of these technologies.
The integration of applications and information sources through the exchange of information based on common semantics or a vocabulary used to define the structure of such information exchange.
A set of architectural principles and patterns which address characteristics such as modularity, encapsulation, loose coupling, separation of concerns, reuse, composable and single implementation.
So when we look at the SOA vision we need to look at 3 aspects:
The business view of a service – what is needed to support the business process
The Architecture view of a service – how do we define and design these services
The implementation view of a service – how do we implement the service through component deployed on the technical infrastructure
The most important characteristic of SOA is the flexibility to treat elements of business processes and the underlying IT infrastructure as secure, standardized components (services) that can be reused and combined to address changing business priorities.
Services are the building blocks
Packaging business functions from new and existing applications in a simple and standardized way creates services that are available for use
Services are used to help get the right information to the right people at the right time
Services can be reused and combined to deploy composite applications to address new opportunities
Increasing use of “Web” services based on open standards complements existing services technology