CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2009/wiki2 16 tvhi

Service Oriented Architecture(SOA) and Patterns

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Introduction

         During the past decade, SOA has been one of the favorite topics among the research community. There are many techniques and services which satisfy the business requirements when implemented stand alone. The challenge is the integration of these various services into a cohesive framework and translation into methodologies so that they can be used for software development. There are potential advantages of using standardized services such as providing high level abstractions to organize large scale applications in open environments, ensuring coordination and interoperation between the programmers. Moreover, generic tools can be developed based on the standards to control the entire software life cycle from design, development, testing, and deployment to maintenance.

         Design Pattern on the other hand helps to build any system more efficiently reducing the time consumption and making the solution more generic. When it comes to common systems like banking or online admission form, it might feel like a lot of unnecessary rework where every bank has to build the system from the scratch. If there is a basic pattern that the bank could use and build its system on the top of that, it saves a lot of work. In terms of Services and Service Oriented Architecture, a design pattern could fall in any level of SOA architecture like business, application etc. Services can be developed using the different patterns available as protocols or APIs. In SOA, when designing a particular service, understanding these patterns can be a lot of help especially in the standardization of service. Any generic web service that has to be implemented can be mapped to one or more of these design patterns. Hence a thorough understanding of these patterns is essential before proceeding with the design of the services

Terminology

• Service Oriented Architecture -

• Design Patterns -

Similarities and Differences

         As discussed in the previous section, the traditional design patterns as described in 1 cover all the major templates that are needed to design any system. Similarly, design patterns used for SOA cover all the templates required to design any service. Hence we can consider the traditional design patterns to be a superset of the SOA patterns. The SOA patterns are called Architectural Patterns which comprise of all the design patterns for the overall composition of a service based solution.