Author:

Ravi Kumar Buragapu

Technical Architect

Abstract This white paper describes the potentials of next generation enterprise technologies and software services that have the capability to deliver zero-footprint, Web-based business applications that are easier to build, cheaper, more reusable, and more maintainable.

INTRODUCTION

The traditional model for selling high-end business software is very inefficient, and is based on investing huge sums of money in sending out sales people to find and persuade prospects to buy the software. The traditional heavyweight, expensive and pay-huge-license-fees-upfront then try-to-implement-forever model does not work anymore.

Furthermore, why do we buy software? Is it so we can have the joy of owning servers, doing backups, patches and maintenance? Of course not! We buy software to get things done. We want to use the services it provides and frankly if we could let someone else manage the headaches all the better.

Of course several Open Source packages are available completely free, which is a perfect solution for the cost problem, but frankly most of these packages are by geeks for geeks; i.e. you really have to be quite IT-savvy to implement, integrate, upgrade them, and as we stated most small businesses simply do not have that type of resource.

The objective of this paper is to describe the brave new world of next generation software services that provides ? All the benefits of enterprise software. ? A faster way to business value. ? A managed approach that frees staff resources. ? A low-risk option for enterprise management. ? A predictable way to achieve better outcomes. THE SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE (SOA) SOA is a architecture and programming model, a way of thinking about building software. An SOA enables you to design software systems that provide services to other applications through published and discoverable interfaces, and where the services can be invoked over a network. When you implement an SOA using Web services technologies, you create a new way of building applications within a more powerful, flexible programming model. You can reduce your development and ownership costs-and your implementation risk. It's important to understand that Web service does not equal SOA. Web services is a collection of technologies, including XML, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Universal Description, Discover and Integration (UDDI), which allow you to build programming solutions for specific messaging and application integration problems. Over time, these technologies can be expected to mature, and eventually be replaced with better, more-efficient, more-robust technology. But for the moment, the existing technologies are sufficient, and have already proven that you can implement an SOA today. SOA is the next wave of application development. Web services and SOA are about designing and building systems using heterogeneous network-addressable software components. Primary characteristics of an SOA are

• Services are used to divide larger applications into smaller discrete modules. • Services are integrated via service composition mechanisms to create larger applications.

A service in SOA is an exposed piece of functionality with four properties.

1. Firstly, the interface that contract to the service is platform-independent. 2. The service can be dynamically located and invoked is the second property. 3. Thirdly, the service is self-contained. That is, the service maintains its own state. 4. Finally, the feature of having a neutral interface definition is known as loose coupling between services. It is not strongly tied to a particular implementation.

A Service is a callable routine that is made available over a network. Services have well-defined interfaces. The interfaces are often published in a directory.

With increasing adoption of SOA, RIA and other emerging trends discussed above, enterprises will become service providers and will no longer dictate the type of applications built and deployed on the enterprise IT infrastructure. An ecosystem of applications built upon services will clearly benefit the enterprise.

Web services are becoming the preferred standards-based SOA approach for enabling external enterprise integration, leading to confusion between SOA and Web Services. Simply remember that SOA is architecture and Web Services is one current implementation technology that can be used to achieve SOA.