Service oriented architecture

What is Service oriented architecture?



Service oriented architecture, commonly called as SOA is a collection of services. Each and every service is used to achieve a functionality for example processing online credit card. These services are exposed over a network, to be used by the consumers. Any authorized consumers can consume the service. Service provider and the service consumer use a common protocol to communicate with each other one such protocol is SOAP.






Above diagram shows a simple Service oriented architecture, with one service provider and one service consumer. Service consumer sends a service request to the service provider over a network accessible by both (example internet). On receiving the service request the service provider processes the request and sends the result back to the service consumer. Sometimes there are scenarios in which Service providers communicates with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity.



Example of SOA

A simple example of SOA is real time credit card processing. The three main components in online credit card processing is

  1. Merchant website
  2. Payment Gateway
  3. Payment processor

Credit card processing is done in the credit card processor. Credit card gateway forwards the request back and forth between the merchant website and the credit card processor, however payment gateways is an optional one. A merchant website can directly interact with the payment processor for processing the credit card by bypassing the payment gateway. Payment gateway provides lot of add one features which makes it an essential one, the discussion on the uses of payment gateway is out of scope.

Once the merchant has successfully signed up for a merchant account with payment processor/ gateways they are authorized to use their services for making an online credit card transaction. The merchant website then sends the customer's credit card information to the payment processors/gateways using the service provided by them, on receiving the information the payment processor processes the credit card transactions and send the results back to the merchant website which is then available for the customer.

Comments

shannon said…
i had no idea about any of this. "service oriented architecture" isn't a term i've ever even heard before, and my business even accept credit card!
January 16, 2008 at 12:08 AM
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