What is SOA, or Service-Oriented Architecture?
In simple words, this is a style of structuring applications in such a way, that they consist of discrete and reusable software modules, each of which has simple and distinct interfaces for data input/output. These modules communicate by sending messages to each other over a network in a legacy "language".
SOA have become the main technology of IT business organisations, as they provide a flexible working model that is able to respond to rapid changes in the fast paced business environment.
Differences between a service and a component.
A component is usually realized in a specific technology, so only clients compatible with this technology could communicate and interoperate with it at very high speeds of processing and communication. However, they are not suitable for mass deployment.
On the other hand, a service accesses the network in a standartised, legacy way, which allows them to communicate freely with any other service available.
SOA has many advantages, but below are the most significant ones:
1. Mobility (transparency). An organisation has the flexibility to move different services to other machines or even providers, without affecting its clients' use of the service. By method of dynamic binding to a service, clients don't even need to know where the service is physically located.
2. Higher availability. Because of location transparency, multiple instances of a service could be executed simultaneously on more than one server. If one machine goes down for a particular reason, a dispatcher redirects user requests to another instance of the service without the client even knowing about this.
3. Scalability. Also due to location transparency, if a client needs more resources or processing power for a specific task over a period of time, a load-balancer could forward requests to multiple service instances simultaneously to get the job done.
4. Interoperability. Since services use standard communication protocols, end clients could directly communicate with a service without the use of interpreters.
5. Modularity. The modular architecture of SOA-based applications allows for improvements within a specific service, if needed, without affecting the overall application as a whole.
6. Reusability. One of the core principles of SOA is reusability. It means reutilisation of existing assets, rather than architecturing a new application from scratch. If a specific module has proved to be successful, it can be reused in future products, which results to lower expenditures and faster time-to-market deployment.
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