SOA & Web Services

 

Although Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has recently become somewhat of a buzzword, the concepts behind it have been around for decades. Ever since the first Hello World program was written, programmers realized that writing software was becoming more and more complex. They needed a better way to reuse code. As a result, they introduced various concepts such as encapsulation, information hiding and abstraction.

A guiding principle behind SOA is that code is less important than the interface to access it. In other words, SOA focuses on what a service does, not how it does it. This principle is what is commonly referred to as abstraction.

Abstraction ensures that a service is independent of a specific implementation and other details. SOA, and more specifically Web services, provide a high degree of abstraction from the service implementation by using standards-based protocols rather than the native interfaces of the underlying technology. Through abstraction, a SOA removes implementation specific references from the service and hides data or behavior in the implementation that is not important to the service consumer.

Abstraction is closely related to encapsulation, which is defined as the process of combining elements to create a new entity, and information hiding, the process of hiding details of an object or function. However, the goal of abstraction is not …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.