Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) - A brief introduction.
Today's IT organizations invariably employ disparate systems and technologies. creating applications that leverage these different technologies has historically been a daunting task. SOA provides a clear solution to these application integration issues by allowing systems to expose their functionality via standardized, interoperable interfaces. SOA built applications out of loosely coupled, large intrinsically unassociated units of functionality commonly referred to as Services. Online Functionalities such as filling an application for an account, viewing an online bank statement or online airlines reservations are examples of such services.
Services are software components that have interfaces that are platform, language, and operating system independent. Since XML and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) are platform independent standards, these are considered the enabling technologies for SOA.
The end client (consumer) can discover services dynamically.
Services are interoperable.
SOA promotes application assembly because services can be reused by numerous consumers. For example we need build only once instance of a service that captures patient demographics and this service can be consumed from any number of applications like an EMR application, a healthcare portal, Practice management solution or an electronic billing system.
SOA uses protocols to define how one or more services can talk with each other instead embedding calls to each other in their source code. Using a process known as Service -orchestration, relatively large chunks of software functionality (services) are associated in a non-hierarchical arrangement by a software engineer, or process engineer, using a special software tool which contains an exhaustive list of all of the services and a means by which the designer can arrange the sequence of the services which a software system can consume and use at run time.
Metadata enables this by describing both the characteristics of the services and also the data that drives them. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) that facilitates the sharing of structured data across different information systems is used extensively in SOA to create data which is wrapped in a nearly exhaustive description container. WSDL which defines services as collections of endpoints or ports is used to describe the services in an XML document format for this purpose. The abstract definition of ports and messages is separated from their concrete use or instance, allowing the
reuse of these definitions), and communications protocols by SOAP.
SOA allows fairly large chunks of functionality to be strung together to form ad-hoc applications which are built almost entirely from existing software services. The services themselves already exist, only orchestration is required to produce a new application. These services could have been developed using any of the classical languages like Java, C#, C++, C or COBOL. SOA services are loosely coupled, and can be run in "safe" wrappers like Java or .NET which manages memory allocation and reclamation, allows ad-hoc and late binding and some degree of data typing.
The future sees SOA systems that combine services created in-house with services offered by third-party software companies (for a fee). This has a potential to spread costs over a number of customers and promotes standardization. In an SOA environment independent services can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation and Binary Spectrum uses our experience to apply these concepts to develop healthcare, retail and financial business systems.
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