Applied SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture and Design Strategies

CHAPTER 9

Using Services to Build Enterprise Solutions

While it’s easy to grasp the theory of SOA, implementing well-designed, practical SOA systems can be a difficult challenge.

– Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz

So far in this book, we have been concentrating on the approaches to designing and building individual services. Although each individual service is important, its functionality is limited to supporting a very specific capability. Building enterprise solutions typically requires leveraging existing enterprise applications for service implementations and combining multiple existing services into enterprise solutions.

This chapter discusses practical approaches to building enterprise solutions using existing enterprise business services (leveraging existing enterprise applications for building business services are covered in the next chapter). We start by defining the overall architecture of the service-based enterprise solutions and a discussion of its constituent parts. We then describe approaches to resolving issues arising during building service-based solutions, including locating and versioning services, and service security, monitoring, and management. We end this chapter with the description of the enterprise service bus — an SOA infrastructure pattern — simplifying the implementation of solutions to the previously mentioned concerns.

This chapter covers the following topic:

• Differences between typical applications and SOA-based enterprise solutions
• Overall high-level architecture ...