Service Orientated Architecture (SOA)
From Softstar Research Wiki
Service Orientated Architecture (SOA)
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style where existing or new functionality are grouped into atomic services. These services communicate with each other by passing data from one service to another, or coordinating an activity between one or more services.
Companies have long sought to integrate existing systems in order to implement information technology (IT) support for business processes that cover all present, and any new perspective systems requirements needed to run the business end-to-end. A variety of designs can be used to this end, ranging from rigid point-to-point electronic data interchange (EDI) interactions to Web auctions. By using half-way measures, such as Internet-enabling EDI-based systems, companies can make their IT systems available to internal or external customers, but the resulting systems have not proven to be flexible enough to meet business demands.
In order to better support the connection and sharing of software functionalities, there was a need for a flexible, standardized architecture. SOA is one such architecture. It unifies business processes by structuring large applications as an ad-hoc collection of smaller modules called services. These applications can be used by different groups of people both inside and outside the company, and new applications built from a mix of services from the global pool exhibit greater flexibility and uniformity. One should not, for example, have to provide redundantly the same personal information to open an online checking, savings or IRA account, and further, the interfaces one interacts with should have the same look and feel and use the same level and type of input data validation. Building all applications from the same pool of services makes achieving this goal much easier and more deployable to affiliate companies. An example of this might be interacting with a rental car company's reservation system even though you are doing so from an airline's reservation system.
