SOA Characteristics in Plain English

There are a lot of SOA Characteristics set, this article will help you to understand SOA Characteristics in plain english explanation. SOA is a way of designing applications using components or services. In other words, an application built in a modular fashion. Actually, this modular approach is not new. In contemporary programming languages, such as Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), modular approach has been put forward in the development application. But, what makes SOA different is a component or services is built and interact with each other freely and loose (Loose Coupled).

With the Loose Coupled nature, a service can be called by the program or other service without needs to pay attention where the location of the service and what the platform is used that service. Loose Coupling is critical to SOA as they can invoke a service by another service at run-time.

SOA Characteristics - Loose Coupled

For example, a core banking application provides a Fund Transfer service, then the other banking applications such as Treasury, Payment Gateway, ATM Switching, and so on can call or invoke Fund Transfer service without need to worry about where the Fund Transfer is located in the network. This contrasts with the Tight Coupling approach. Each application defining their own Fund Transfer, the problem come when the Transfer Fund logic is change. It will be difficult and require high cost (and time, of course) to set the new logic into each application.

Another SOA Characteristics are Service Interface and Service Implementation. Service Interface states how the service can be called, such as parameter input / output and the location it resides. For Example, the Service Interface for the Customer Lookup express a variety of ways to get customer information (input parameter can be Customer ID, Name, etc) and customer data structure that is returned. Service Implementation is explaining how the logic of the Customer Lookup service works.

SOA Characteristics - Service Interface & Service Implementation

Service Implementation is highly associated with the programming technology used. SOA doesn’t need to care on how a service is implemented. Whether written in JAVA or C#, the important thing is how the service can be invoked and provide information in accordance with its Service interface.

The last SOA Characteristic is Business Oriented. in short, each service has to do a particular business. For Example, Fund Transfer Service, Customer Lookup Service, Inventory Check Service, etc. It is inevitable that the success of SOA also driven by the high acceptance of Web Services Technologies among application developers. SOA and Web Services has now become a synergy and even some people consider when you use Web Services, then you are implementing SOA.

Tags: Business Oriented, Characteristics of SOA, Loose Coupled, Service Implementation, Service Interface, SOA Characteristics