From financial institutions to manufacturing vendors, companies are constantly adopting technologies, the goals they consider are consistent - making operations more efficient and able to quickly seize opportunities, and make decisions better than their competitors. However, under the conditions they all purchased the same system and software, the actual advantages reflect the ability to apply these tools in innovation and efficient ways. Creating a application infrastructure that can bring huge benefits, you need to use the application's architecture to efficiently use core services.
The latest application architecture conceived by industry analysts and strategic consultants is a service-oriented architecture, soa. For many people, it sounds like it is arbitrarily putting some industries. But this concept itself is very intuitive. For its core, SOA is a collection of services. From the viewpoint of both software and business functions, the service is to define a good software component, which does not rely on any context or status that calls its application.
These services are usually implemented as a web service, and the application can access it by simple object access protocol (Simple Object Access Protocol, SOAP), which is transmitted in XML based on the HTTP protocol. The advantage of using a Web standard in SOA is that services can be more easily adaptable to a variety of applications. Don't have to program special programming, in addition to making it able to receive requests and transmission results using SOAP. Therefore, in many cases, companies can intuitively build web services, and even adaptive software to create new web services.
How does SOA give corporate competitive advantage and make it a response to business opportunities? Simply, it enables companies to define the basics it needs, and efficiently serve their core business and quickly adapt to the changing business environment. After these core services are implemented, any application can call them to access and analyze data, build new business methods, or provide data or feature that enables quick reference to reward from investment.
This means that SOA is both a technical strategy and a business strategy. It is a business strategy for the business of the service delivery core value. Designed to meet the SOA service, you must be familiar with and understand your business in order to determine what features can be used across multiple applications. Moreover, they must be integrated to support a variety of applications with different purposes, while it must be special enough to provide real value to a single application.
From the perspective of technology, challenges are present in the architecture of enterprise web services. Because of fundamentally, SOA is a stream and a relationship of service interfaces, design interfaces and their relationships require expertise in Web technology, business processes, and services, and their applications, etc. Architeists must not only understand how to construct Web services, but also understand how existing applications and how to use them use them.
SOA is accelerating
How important is the concept of SOA in a wave of competitive advantage to creating a competitive advantage? According to the analyst of Gartner Group, SOA has become mainstream last year, and in the future, most companies use this architecture to integrate into more business in the number of applications. know how. In particular, Gartner is expected that more than 60% of companies will consider regarding the SOA as a guiding principle in the process of designing their new task critical business applications and business processes. In addition, at that time, more than 75% of medium and large enterprises have adopted development tools and middleware for SOA.
Obviously, companies have realized the advantage of implementing SOA flexibility and simpleness. But regardless of the concept of the concept, building an enterprise SOA is a huge challenge for technology and business. From a business point of view, it is necessary to determine what service needs to be skilled in the business operations and software architectural knowledge. Fortunately, the company has experts with expertise, and the role of the enterprise architect is integrated into the overall planning and design of SOA implementation. Technically, these services are defined and their interfaces to the application, and then implement these services, which is the core part of the SOA. To provide a critical business application, the service must be a reliable, self-contained system, and can respond to requests from various client applications. These clients may be some of the rich Windows applications used by some specified internal users, or a thousand-tentative web front ends accessed.
Building a web service architecture that can deliver value is the task of enterprise architects. Architects Realize web services, and then the business domain experts call these services. However, services needed in the business domain can be implemented in different forms, depending on the functions and limitations of available technologies.
Here is where corporate architects increase great value. He or her has a function of enterprise infrastructure, as well as the outstanding design and implementation skills. Some developers can focus on building and maintain core services, while others can quickly implement applications that consume one or more such services, enable companies to respond to changing business and competitive environments. If a company can build its architect's SOA, you will get huge business benefits.
Building these Web services is usually outside the capabilities of corporate technicians. Experienced programmer / analysts have both programming experience, also have knowledge of business logic after applications, but there are still some real gaps that have been integrated into the web service. Many of this older lacks experiences in writing using a Web protocol, or to build reliable and high-performance distributed applications. In some cases, Java and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platforms themselves may not be familiar.
Enterprises seeking to get business advantages from a web service architecture must overcome these puzzles to achieve maximum efficiency and flexibility. Training is undoubtedly part of the answer, but training also requires substantial investment, and some practical experience in achieving high efficiency.
But only formal training does not make experienced programmers / analysts become old-efficient and efficient web service developers. Training in J2EE platforms and Web service provides skills, but realization experience in the real world is essential for delivering value. Typically, only a reliable and efficient SOA is designed and constructs only a sufficient design and platform implementation techniques that specialize in Web service architects and senior developers.
Use design model to share expert knowledge
There is a way to enable companies to get business benefits from experienced programmers / analysts, and can get expert knowledge from rich enterprise architects, that is, design mode. The design pattern enables architects to define best practices to implement SOA Web service components, including database access, SOAP reception, and decoding, and business logic. The package of the best practices is sufficiently understood, so that programs / analysts that may be insufficient in terms of platform or algorithm can successfully write code based on this model. In many cases, the mode is implemented with a single programmer can be used directly.
Design patterns may come from three different sources - design and development tools manufacturers, platform communities, and businesses. The best way is to use the design model provided by tool manufacturers who are universally trusted, as enterprise architects have complement the basis of the mode library when building these design patterns, which will add unique value to specific enterprises. The model developed by the platform community can fill the shortcomings from the other two sources, although it must be fully tested before the release they are used for general purpose.
Enterprises can deliver SOA strategies quickly and efficiently using business and technology architects. By adopting a trusted business model, developers can combine their business expertise and inspected SOA build blocks. With the internal design and expertise provided by the enterprise architect, it is packaged to custom mode, which provides two best options. Architects can do the best - design efficient business services - experienced developers add value through the knowledge of how to build business processes. This labor division provides the best opportunity to design and adopt SOA, which truly represents the core services of the company, and has become the basis for the application strategy of responsive business needs. The SOA mode method is the necessary way to implement the promise of this emerging architecture.
Origin
http://www.fawcette.com/special/soa/overview/
About the author Peter Varhol is a technical expert from Compuware.
