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Service-Oriented Architecture: What Is It and How Can It Help Your Business?

By Charlie Fink, published on 29 Apr 2007
Page 1 of 3
  1. Defining Service-Oriented Architectures
  2. How Service-Oriented Architectures Can Benefit a Business
  3. Making Adjustments More Easily with Service-Oriented Architectures

Defining Service-Oriented Architectures

Service-oriented architecture, or SOA, is a hot topic in business today. You may have read about service-oriented architectures and be wondering how they can affect your business as well as how they can be of use to you. By looking at it from both a real-world perspective as well as a technical perspective, you will forge a solid understanding of service-oriented architecture from which you can jump off to implementing this technology within your business.

Defining Service-Oriented Architectures

Essentially, a service is the implementation of some step in one or more business processes, and a service-oriented architecture takes advantage of those services. More importantly, service-oriented architectures have many benefits for businesses, including enabling better alignment of business requirements and technology. Service-oriented architectures also allow services to be easily swapped out or reused for different purposes. And a service-oriented architecture gives your business the ability to leverage existing services easily while also leaving the option to write new services to fulfill specific purposes.

Service-oriented architectures rely heavily on programming in XML, a text-based mark up language that enables developers to define their own specific structure of data. However, one major benefit of setting up a service-oriented architecture is that it doesn't matter which language or protocol is used. Instead, the process can be written to be able to be used across many platforms.

One simple example of service-oriented architecture would be a program that installed on a computer that can organize a user's digital music library. The program may work best if it has access to the Internet and can utilize a service - looking up the name of a CD or song title in a large music database, for example, or giving access to an online store that uses the same database in a different manner. Service-oriented architectures are essentially about giving existing services new functionality.

Comments

  1. Scott Gee
    17 Aug 2007 at 03:24
    It is easy to tell that Charles "gets it" about what SAAS has to offer, I only wish "I got it"!  The examples Charles provides are minimalist, but they do convey the idea of how you can leverage data that you either have, or have access to, and can turn that information into a service that your company can provide as a business.

    Unfortunately I live in the real world.  As an independent software author specializing in industrial automation applications, I am still having a hard time figuring out how I can leverage what I know into a service that my company can provide to an established customer base.

    Many of the industrial automation giants such as Siemens, Fanuc, & Allen-Bradley provide comprehensive software solutions such as SCADA and DCS (at a premium price) to their customers, and this "one stop shopping software paradigm" makes it difficult to find areas where us small folks can cultivate new business opportunities.

    I would like to invite Charles (or any other DeveloperFusion member) to discuss and identify SAAS methodologies where there is an established business base, but software companies like mine can still find niche opportunities to leverage our knowledge of SAAS into real business opportunities.

    Thank you Charles for your contribution; authors like yourself make DeveloperFusion a website that I visit everyday.

    Best regards,

    Scott
    scott@isdtech.com
















  2. Developer Fusion Bot
    01 Jan 1999 at 00:00

    This thread is for discussions of Service-Oriented Architecture: What Is It and How Can It Help Your Business?.

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Charlie Fink Charlie Fink is the vice president of product development and delivery for WestLake Training and Development. He has been designing and developing leading software solutions for over 15 years and h...
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