Introduction to Service Oriented Architecture - SOA

In this Session I will explain briefly about Service Oriented Architecture - SOA.To understand the SOA, let assume we have a software called "Service Consumer" and it would like to communicate with another software called "Service Provider".


Service Consumer will send a Service request which is a message to the Service Provider.
Thereafter Service Provide will reply back with a Service Response to the Consumer.
The flow is shown in the below figure.

When the "Service Request" is received by the "Service Provider" , it will be process by the Service.
A Service is a well defined function that does not depend on the state of the other services.

The Service Consumer needs to know how to call this service ,i.e what parameter , what argument the Service is expecting and what kind of response the service would be sending back to the Consumer.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a solution to make two software communicate with each others.

A human being can interact with a Keyboard with a software. For Example when fill out a webpage form , you can easily do that because one side we have a human and other side a software. But when two software communicate with each other there has to be a discipline in place. SOA will play the role to make two software communicate with each other.


This Implementation of Service Provider and Service Consumer can be implemented in different way. Webservices is the Implementation of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).