Webservice ::: Part1:-SOA introduction

Service Oriented Architecture or SOA for short is a new architecture for the development of loosely coupled distributed applications. In fact service-oriented architecture is collection of many services in the network. These services communicate with each other and the communications involves data exchange & even service coordination
Nowadays SOA is based on the Web Services.
Broadly SOA can be classified into two terms: Services and Connections.
Services:
A service is a function or some processing logic or business processing that is well-defined, self-contained, and does not depend on the context or state of other services.
Connections:
Connections means the link connecting these self-contained distributed services with each other, it enable client to Services communications. In case of Web services SOAP over HTTP is used to communicate the between services.

Benefits of the Service Oriented Architecture

• Due to its platform independence, it allows companies to use the software and hardware of their choice.
• There is no threat of vendor lock-in .
• SOA enables incremental development, deployment, and maintenance.
• Companies can use the existing software (investments) and use SOA to build applications without replacing existing applications .
• The training costs are low, so the available labor pool can be used for running the applications

Example of the service-oriented architecture

Above figure shows how a service consumer sends a service request to a service provider. After accepting the request, service provider send a message to the service consumer. In this case a service provider can also be a service consumer.