Patterns: Implementing Self-Service in an SOA Environment

36 Patterns: Implementing Self-Service in an SOA Environment

between business benefits, technology maturity, and implementation or

maintenance efforts.

3.1.5 SOA summary

SOA and Web services enable new opportunities for more flexible, rapid, and

widespread integration in a model that is consistent with the exposure of

business function as services. SOA and Web services offer the choreography of

those services into processes that can be modeled, executed, and monitored

with features such as:

򐂰 SOA defines concepts and general techniques for designing, encapsulating,

and invoking reusable business functions through loosely bound service

interactions. Most of the techniques have been proven individually in previous

technologies or design styles. SOA unites them in an approach that is

intended to bring encapsulation and reuse to the enterprise level.

򐂰 Web services provide an emerging set of open-standard technologies that

can be combined with proven existing technologies to implement the

concepts and techniques of SOA.

򐂰 Industry support for Web services standards, interoperability among different

implementations of Web services, and the infrastructure technology that is

required to support an SOA give technology customers increasingly mature

and sophisticated technologies that are suitable for SOA implementation.

These techniques and technologies give you the tools that are required to

implement flexible SOAs and to evolve toward an on demand business model.

However, SOA is an architectural approach, not a technology or a product. In

order to implement an SOA, you must have the infrastructure to support the

architecture, such as an Enterprise Service Bus.

3.2 Overview of the Enterprise Service Bus

Successfully implementing an SOA requires applications and infrastructure that

can support the SOA principles. Applications can be enabled by creating service

interfaces to existing or new functions that are hosted by the applications. The

service interfaces should be accessed using an infrastructure that can route and

transport service requests to the correct service provider. As organizations

expose more and more functions as services, it is vitally important that this

infrastructure should support the management of SOA on an enterprise scale.