Understanding Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

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Understanding Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Most SaaS solutions provide complete solutions, meaning an application that can be used within a web browser. For example, Salesforce.com provides a web application for customer relationship management, TurboTax provides a web application for filing taxes, and QuickBooks provides a web application for business accounting. Beyond providing a complete application with a user interface, many solution providers offer specific services that developers can access across the web from within programs they create. Developers refer to these services as web services. A developer might, for example, use web services to do the following:

CASE 2-6 Online School SaaS Solutions

Online education has remained one of the fastest growing segments within education markets. Millions of learners now take courses online. Using cloud-based learning management systems, universities offer courses in both synchronous (learners meet at a specific day and time) and asynchronous (learners make their own schedule) formats. By leveraging cloud-based systems, schools can reduce their IT resources and staffing costs, essentially paying for learning services on demand. FIGURE 2-7 shows an SaaS-based virtual classroom.

FIGURE 2-7 A SaaS-based virtual classroom using the open-source Moodle solution.

Courtesy of Moodle.

Exercise Using the web, search for demographic information on the size of the online learning environment. Discuss how you expect this market to evolve over the next 10 years.

CASE 2-7 Microsoft Office 365 SaaS for Document Creation, Editing, and Sharing

For as long as most of us can remember, computer users have made extensive use of the Microsoft Office suite: Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and more. Traditionally users had to purchase and install Office, a relatively expensive investment. Then users had to keep installing updates to the software as they became available from Microsoft. Businesses, in turn, would normally license Office for each of their employees.

With the advent of the cloud, to reduce costs many users began to use products such as OpenOffice (LibreOffice), an open source, free, Office-compatible solution. Today, millions of users have found Google Docs, which can be used from any computer, a compelling tool.

To meet user demands and to match competitor offerings, Microsoft released Office 365, a pay-by-the-month subscription to the Office applications, which, as shown in FIGURE 2-8, resides in the cloud.

FIGURE 2-8 Office 365 provides cloud-based subscription access to the Office suite of applications.

Used with permission from Microsoft.

Using Office 365, users can access and edit their documents from any computer as well as many handheld devices. If needed, users can save their documents to local devices. FIGURE 2-9, for example, shows a PowerPoint document in Office 365.

FIGURE 2-9 Users can access cloud-based Office 365 documents from any computer as well as many handheld devices.

Further, because the Office 365 documents are cloud based, users and teams can easily collaborate and share documents.

Exercise Assume your company has 1000 employees who need access to the Microsoft Office suite of products. Analyze the potential cost savings of using Microsoft Office 365 over purchasing seat licenses for each user.

Query the price of a stock
Check a warehouse for current product inventory levels
Get real-time road or weather conditions
Check airline flight departure or arrival information
Purchase a product or service
Perform credit card processing

As shown in FIGURE 2-10, an SaaS application interacts with a user, whereas a web service interacts with a program.

An illustration shows SaaS application in a cloud interacting with a user outside the cloud. A web server in the same cloud interacts with an application outside the cloud. — FIGURE 2-10 Web services are solutions that programs can call across the web to perform specific tasks.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an application development methodology with which developers create solutions by integrating one or more web services. Think of a web service as a function or subroutine a program can call to accomplish a specific task. As shown in FIGURE 2-11, when a program running on one computer calls a web service, a message, possibly containing parameter values, is sent across the network (or Internet) to the computer housing the web service. That computer, in turn, performs its processing and normally returns a result to the caller.

An illustration shows an application consisting of instructions and web service call sending a message with parameters to a server in a cloud representing web service. — FIGURE 2-11 To call a web service, a program typically sends a message to the web service that resides on a remote computer and then waits for the web service to return a result.

Some developers refer to web services as remote-procedure calls. Further, developers refer to a set of web services as an application program interface (API). Amazon and eBay, for example, provide APIs that programmers can use to purchase products from across the web using the programs they create.

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Table of Contents for Understanding Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

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Understanding Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Table of Contents for
Understanding Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)