[Entry series] What can I do with the service-oriented architecture?

The need for SOA comes from the need to make the business IT system more flexible to adapt to changes in the business. By allowing strongly defined relationships and specific implementations that are still flexible, IT systems can utilize the functions of existing systems and prepare for future changes to meet their interaction needs.

The following is a specific example. A clothing retail organization has 500 international chain stores, and they often need to change their designs to catch up with fashion trends. This may mean not only changing the style and color, but also changing the fabric, manufacturer, and deliverables. If the system between the retailer and the manufacturer is incompatible, the replacement from one supplier to another may be a very complicated software process. By using the flexibility of the WSDL interface in terms of operation, every company can maintain their existing systems as they are, instead of simply matching the WSDL interface and developing a new service level agreement, in this way, you do not have to completely rebuild their software systems. This is a change in the business level, that is, they change partners, and all business operations remain unchanged. Here, the business interface can be slightly changed, but internal operations do not need to be changed. The only reason for doing so is to work with external partners.

Another form is internal changes. In this change, the retail organization now decides that it will also rent some places in the store of chain stores to small stores that sell popular clothes, this can be seen as a business model using a store-in-store. Although most of the company's business operations remain unchanged, they now need new internal software to handle such rental arrangements. While internal software systems can withstand comprehensive overhaul, they need to do so without having a major impact on interaction with existing supplier systems. In this case, the SOA model remains intact, but the internal implementation changes. Although new aspects can be added to the SOA model to add the responsibilities of the new lease arrangement, the normal retail management system continues as usual.

To continue the concept of internal changes, IT managers may find that new software configurations can be used in another way, such as renting and pasting posters for advertising purposes. Here, the new business proposal is derived from reusing the flexible SOA model in the new design. This is a new achievement from the SOA model and a new opportunity, which may not be available in the past.

Vertical changes are also possible. In this change, retailers have completely changed from selling their own clothing to renting places through shop-in-shop models. If vertical changes start completely from the bottom layer, a significant change in the structure of the SOA model may occur, with which new systems, software, processes, and relationships may change. In this case, the benefit of the SOA model is that it considers issues from the perspective of business operations and processes rather than from applications.ProgramAnd program, which allows business management to clearly determine what needs to be added, modified, or deleted based on business operations. The software system can then be constructed into a suitable way for business processing, rather than other methods that are often seen on many existing software platforms.

As you can see, changes and the ability of SOA systems to adapt to changes are the most important part here. For developers, such changes may occur both within the scope of their work and beyond the scope of their work, it depends on whether there are changes. You Need To Know How interfaces are defined and how they interact with each other. Different from developers, architects act as a major change to the SOA model. This division of labor allows developers to concentrate on creating functional units defined as services, while architects and modelers concentrate on how to properly organize these units, it has been around for more than a decade. Generally, it uses the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and describes it as a model-driven architecture (MDA ).