Service Oriented Architecture
SOA is said to enable business organizations to
be more competitive at the same time as providing the IT
departments with the means to respond to organizational demands of
new ways of working. But what is SOA? How can I use it in my
company? Can my older systems be SOA enabled? First some basic SOA
definitions:
- Free standing, independent components
- Combined by loose coupling
- Message (XML) based instead of API based
With SOA, your organization may reuse of
existing assets (your existing application systems) to a greater
extent and may respond faster to change requests. These benefits
are attributed to several critical elements of SOA:
- The services reflect logical business activities.
- New services can be added or created to existing services
without affecting the existing service implementations.
- The services communicate by standard protocols providing
broader interoperability.
- SOA encompasses legacy systems (i.e. existing, often older
application systems) and processes so that the effectiveness of
existing investments is preserved and may even be increased.
- Services have an interface and are message-oriented.
The introduction of SOA provides a platform for
the technology and business departments in a company to meet common
goals of the modern enterprise.