What is a Service Oriented Architecture?
SOA is basically an attempt by an IT service company to provide various IT services over the Internet that are available to various external clients, ie email services on a cloud network. Clients can access these services instead of purchasing the hardware, software and spending monthly IT support costs. A properly deployed SOA will enable unique secure access AND be scalable as increase capacity or service upgrades are required. SOA can also be considered internal for large IT enterprises. For the Internet and smaller businesses, a service provider such as www.hsp-central.net covers all elements of an entire office LAN yet in a virtual cloud which saves a client more than 50% of traditional office LAN costs.
For completeness we include two different definitions, one from W3C: “A set of components which can be invoked, and whose interface descriptions can be published and discovered.” And a second from LooselyCoupled: “A system for linking resources on demand. In an SOA, resources are made available to other participants in the network as independent services that are accessed in a standardized way. This provides for more flexible loose coupling of resources than in traditional systems architectures.
When you design a system with a workflow engine as the conductor and director, every activity in the system must be implemented as a standalone, re-usable component that can be directed to execute the activity required. As a result the components operate as services that can be orchestrated based on an input document or definition.
For completeness we include two different definitions, one from W3C: “A set of components which can be invoked, and whose interface descriptions can be published and discovered.” And a second from LooselyCoupled: “A system for linking resources on demand. In an SOA, resources are made available to other participants in the network as independent services that are accessed in a standardized way.
