In the last few years, it has been observed that SOA is gaining popularity in software environment. The concept is extremely important in today’s world where the business environment is dynamic and there is a frequent change in the business processes because of regulatory requirements, internal procedures or other reasons. In this environment it becomes extremely important for the system to adapt with the changes.
Service Oriented Architecture (or SOA, as it is popularly known as) is the arrangement in which a system exposes its functionality to outside systems in the form of services. The outside system passes the parameters and in return get the results based on the logic built into the native system. The outside system does not need to be aware of internal logics and procedures of the native system that host the service.
The systems interact with each other through something called Web Service that are nothing but XML functions. So, from high level perspective, the native system exposes its functionality in the form of XML functions that are utilized or more technically, the services are consumed, by outside system for performing one or multiple operations for carrying out the business logic.
Now the systems can belong to the same organization or the internal systems can use services of a system hosted outside the organization. Consider for instance, a business process that intake documents in different languages and than perform some operation on the content, converted in English.
There are two options to get this done. Either the entire activity can be managed by one system with all the logics built into it or there can be multiple systems deployed to manage different set of activities. Each system can use the already available services of other systems.
The main system that manages the entire process, pass document and the input language to a third party system that will return the English converted text to the native system. There is no requirement of building language conversion logic into the main system. All the advanced methods of language conversion will be managed by third party system. With this example it is clear that the expertise and advancement of the converter is inherited into the native system without putting any additional logic into it. This is the typical concept an SOA environment.
In SOA environment, any change in the business logic will not result into change in the underlying application. Rather, only the business tier will be modified. Apart from it, maintenance of different systems will be managed individually.
SoA has made the life of system developers easier where different systems communicate with each other with web services in the integrated environment.
