CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2010/ch6 6j ps

Introduction

Service oriented architecture is an architectural approach for building and integrating software applications.In SOA approach each application is broken down into many service and these services can be used to build an entire system.For example banking software which does all sort of operations like telling the balance of account holder, depositing money into account annd getting credit history and so on.With traditional architecture. Give one example.

Need for SOA??

To appreciate SOA well one should understand the problems faced by current software architectures and problems addressed by Service Oriented architecture. Consider the example of bank.Say the bank is currently handling credit card division , and it developed a software to handle all its transactions. This software developed is a collection and interaction of various modules like getuserinformation, checking balance , check credit card history and process payments and so on .Say at some later point of time, bank started debit card division and again now to handle all its debit card related functionality it need one more software and it does almost have similar functionality as credit card ,with some differences in functionality. Now the possible solutions bank can think in developing the software for debit card division would be :- 1)Take same code and make changes to it : The problem with this approach is code duplication and maintainable.Say if bug crops in one of the module we now need to change at 2 places one in credit card software and another in debit card software.If company thinks of developing the debit card software then even code reuse is not possible. 2)Object oriented approach of inheriting objects: One might say bank can use Object oriented approach and derive class and functionalities and so on.Even then we have problem with this approach, we can't tamper the existing credit card software and even maintainability is problem over here.As discussed previously, if bank thinks of writing new software in different programming language then this solution also gets ruled out.

This is where SOA comes to rescue, SOA approach tells us to make each functionality as a software service .Each service to exploit the functionality of other service communicates to it using languages like 'xml' as compare to function calls in convetion programming language.With this approach we have many advantages

1)Reusable code in the form of services: Code is reused in the form of services. 2)Code is easily maintainable:- as functionality is offered as a service and it is single place . 3)Support for legacy functions:We can reuse legacy functions by writing wrapper around the functionality and make it interact with other services using xml. 4)Platform and language independant services - as services interact with each other through xml so there is no requirement of both functions in same programming language.