In this article, you will learn about latest standards for Service Oriented Architecture, and in particular, how it relates to Oracle, in today’s competitive world.

SOA of the Next Generation

In this day and age, enterprise applications have already begun the transition from user interface driven applications to assemblies of interoperable services that are also reusable. Such services are representative of the easy business functions that are intended to be assembled together in to the form of new applications.

One of the main advantages of such a change in application architecture is that services can now be reused in the evolution of business processes. At the same time, users should keep in mind that such an approach to the construction of composite applications and business processes will not work in the absence of a standards compliant platform for the construction of such services.

Interoperability can be quite a challenge owing to the fact that Web services protocols for such activities as messaging, optimization, and reliability can be quite complicated. Services may in fact be hosted across a number of different platforms. Without a platform that has been designed around standards and targeted towards achieving interoperability, it may not be possible to quickly weave services together as a means of meeting rapidly evolving business requirements.

One type of middleware developed by Oracle, Oracle Fusion Middleware, has been constructed on a common service infrastructure. It is designed to utilize industry standards for all its Service Oriented Architecture capabilities. Service quality protocols and optimization of messages are provided as a means of improving functionality. Such tools can be utilized outside of business logic as well as the implementation strategy for services.

Businesses will also benefit from standards that describe not merely how applications cooperate, but how they are constructed. Through the usage of Service Oriented Architecture standards, businesses can escape platform lock ins, while developers will be brought up to speed with skills that are easily transferable.

In short, the next generation of development standards are going to focus on two main areas: first, the providing of a common model for the control of relationships among services; secondly, allowing developers to implement robust web services utilizing familiar Java objects.

Standards

While there might have been an explosion of proposals for web services early on, the standard platform for Service Oriented Architecture is constructed on a platform that is based in the following three areas: implementation, messaging, and service description and discovery. Let’s take a look first at the messaging component.

Messaging

Readily comprehensible and interoperable standards for the sending of messages among services form the basis of interoperability. In order for services to be able to communicate with each other, messages should be encoded according to SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2 specifications. The messages are then exchanged through HTTP. SOAP standards thus form the foundation of network interoperability.

Two vital standards that are utilized as a means of aiding the capabilities of compression and efficiency within SOAP messages that include binary content are MTOM and SOAP with Attachments.

The Oracle Service Fabric makes use of both optimizations as a means of ensuring that services are able to communicate in as fast and efficient a means as is possible. As SOAP provides only the basics of message exchange, a lot more data is needed in order to provide message directives in the event of an asynchronous exchange. WS Addressing defines message headers that are then applied to SOAP messages in order to determine where responses can best be sent while simultaneously rendering correlation among the messages.

It is quite often vital to provide guarantees that asynchronous messages will be delivered to services. Oracle has worked with OASIS standards body to co-author and drive industry convergence surrounding the WS ReliableMessaging protocol, which is utilized by services as a means of providing guarantees around the delivery of messages and the order in which messages are processed.

One of the most vital components of web services for enterprise applications is security. Oracle is one of the companies that have been leading work in a lot of the key standard committees surrounding security as well as identity federation via the use of Web Services. SOAP messages in particular are secured via WS Security, which is now used as a means for defining the ways in which encryption, authentication, and digital signatures should be utilized as a means for securing communications.