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  3. May 2006

Re: Application design & architecture

Chris,
SOA is Service-Oriented Architecture. What that means, is that the IT architecture for your company should be focused on services - that is, business processes. Depending on what it is you do, and how your company interoperates with your business partners (vendors, suppliers, customers), the architecture would proscribe a means to identify what level of granularity should be used for a service. For example, in most cases, performing a file-get function is too detailed, performing a complete customer order entry process is not detailed enough. 

Examples of the business processes in a customer order entry process are:
1) Retrieve customer information
2) Perform customer credit check
3) Retrieve product information
4) Determine product availability
5) Allocate inventory
6) Repeat 3-6 as needed
7) Confirm shipping requirements
8) Confirm customer order
Each of these might be granular enough for your SOArchitecture. In that case, we could write each of these business processes individually, then choreograph them together to create the entire business workflow. If we had business partners to perform some of these tasks, then we may consume a web service from outside our company. The easiest examples are performing a credit check, or retrieving product information from some service like UCCNet.
For the internal calls, we could use web services, or the SOArchitecture would provide a standard means of communicating between all our platforms and applications. This is also service-oriented.
The simplest kind of examples of web services are tasks like currency conversions and zip code lookups. These are very granular, but if there is a company supplying a web service to perform a currency conversion, it saves you time writing that code (less maintenance), you can get up to the minute realtime currency rates, and all you have to do is consume a web service - like calling a program, just a different interface. You send the parameters - for example, the currency code and a number to convert, and it will return a parameter that contains the conversion amount.
SOA itself does not "offer" the service. Your company will build and expose services for many reasons. You may provide a web service to retrieve customer details from one platform, thus alleviating the need to synchronize the customer database between servers and OSs. 

Hope this helps,
Trevor
----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Payne" 
Subject: RE: Application design & architecture



Trevor,
Can you give an example of a "service" that would be offered by
SOA?
Chris

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