When to use SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) [closed]

Answer 1

SOA can be used as a way to hide the implementation details of your subsystems. If your customers need product information, for instance, it's probably a good idea to wrap your product database or inventory subsystem into a generic service and expose only the subset of functionality and data your customers need. Then, if you ever need to replace or upgrade that subsystem, you'll be able to make those changes transparent to your users and you customer facing software interface.

Answer 2

to integrate different technologies accessing same resources; to achieve certain level of transactional isolation over those different technologies; to keep one business logic written in one place (so there would not be nigthtmares when this logic is to be changed) ...

Answer 3

There is another school of related thought termed SOAD (Service Orientated Application Design) exists were every component of the system is a service. This is to leverage the benefits offered by the environment that they are built with (EJB, WCF) i.e. you get lots of free plumbing.

Some more resource on this at

Building a SOA

SOA Design Pattern

Achieving integrity in a SOA

Achieving Flexibility/Maintainability in a SOA

Answer 4

There are many scenarios in which you'd benefit from using services. Some of these scenarios have been codified by industry gurus (such as Thomas Erl of SOA fame).

SOAPatterns

I'd say you want to look for:

• Legacy application reuse
• Business process reuse (multiple use cases for same process)
• Implementation abstraction (platform, language, persistence abstraction)

Your colleague is right to be cautious. There are a lot of deployment and support variables introduced with adoption of web services.