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The main use of SOA from what I have experienced is in Reusability of services and promoting business agility by connecting disparate systems. Is there other major importance. If yes, please state them? I am looking for an answer which can make a novice understand what is SOA when you explain about its importance to him.

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coder kemp
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SOA is an architectural style, may be realized by web services, but SOA is not just about web services. Web services are all about exposing the implementation in a standard way, whereas SOA is concerned about integration. It basically aligns your IT infrastructure towards the changing trends in the business. Let us look at a simple scenario: Let's say there is the company that has its IT infrastructure first developed in the late 80s and was completely running on the mainframe. IT dept had many alternatives to the mainframe, but since they are of different technologies, they follow different protocols, and so communication cannot happen directly. They need some sort of layer in between that acts as a translator. So, the IT department had to write the intercommunication layers to talk to legacy code, Everything went on well until a point when the competition in the business grew so much as of now where the same system is interacting with MDM, dot net, infra services etc. All those cross-technology interactions had become too much to IT dept, both to develop and maintain. So, SOA is like a set of standards that have to be followed while building the business application which enables applications to be cost-extendable, flexible and makes the overall application cost-effective.

Kunwar jee Pathak
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  • Hey, would you please expand your answer, like what those standards could be – Mehdi Mar 06 '17 at 13:57
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    Soa can help business respond more quickly and promote reuse at micro services ( service level). To illustrate further in real world setting, let us consider an e-commerce site like amazon.com. In order to have seamless transaction, several systems developed at different times using different operating system have to work together. One program for instance tracks inventory and relays the information to your interface, which is web in this case. An entirely different program altogether runs a shopping cart where your selections are sorted while you shop. – Kunwar jee Pathak Mar 06 '17 at 16:23
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    When you are finished shopping and ready to check out, there will be likely a program that processes your payment. Without SOA, process would be chaotic and lead to frustration on the part of the customer. – Kunwar jee Pathak Mar 06 '17 at 16:25
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    those standards can be Service Reusability, Composability, Service Orientation and Interoperability, Statelessness, Service loose coupling, Service Abstraction, Service Discoverability, Standardized service contracts, reduced IT Burden. – Kunwar jee Pathak Mar 06 '17 at 17:08
  • @KunwarjeePathak Nice example. I knew SOA to be a Architectural style. Reusability, loose coupling and making integration possible for the entire enterprise seems possible with SOA. I would like to know what other alternatives to SOA exist in recent times? There are many enterprises which do not believe in the concept of SOA, SCA(Component as a service). On what architecture do they run? Taking your example, it might be possible that Amazon may not be using SOA architectural pattern. They may be just dealing with Web API. I wanted to know other technologies which do same work as SOA. Thanks – coder kemp Mar 07 '17 at 18:41
  • @coder kemp From an architectural standpoint, Oracle Service Bus and Mule ESB also differs from SOA. The major difference between OSB and SOA Suite would be that OSB is stateless while SOA Suite can maintain the state in Database. Also comparing OSB with SOA suite is not worth it since SOA Suite has got different components within itself like BPEL, Mediator, Business Rules, Human Workflow etc which can be used to build a composite application. – Kunwar jee Pathak Mar 08 '17 at 11:09
  • OSB could be very well compared to Mediator component of SOA Suite, which performs more or less similar activities, Mediator performs within the boundary of SOA Suite composite, while OSB performs the same @code kemp : activity independently. There is the concept of Microservices which is gaining very much popularity.Similarly, Mule ESB is open source and it has its own architectural pattern. But, from point of view of SOA governance which is an extension (subset) of IT governance(ISO 38500), everyone has to follow some set of standards. – Kunwar jee Pathak Mar 08 '17 at 11:10