Most organisations rely on a multitude of different systems to perform critical tasks.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) design patterns allow for increased adoption rate of a new computer system, both internally and externally of your business. With SOA the same system can simultaneously be used with ease in diverse environments, from web services to proprietary protocol networks.
Shore Tech Systems can:
- Design efficient and highly flexible service based systems
What makes a good service?
If business functions are carefully mapped out they can often be reorganised into a number of service based systems.
External companies can have access to internal resources; internal departments can communicate effectively with other internal departments; managers can easily overview all transactions. In the past this would have only been possible if everyone spoke the same language. However, by utilising WCF, communication format can between services can be altered with a simple configuration change.
Examples of business practises that are good candidates for services are order management, time management, help desk request, booking of resources, the list is endless.
Talk to us about how we can help you implement services accessible to all.
Scalability
Scalability is a key to an effective service. By keeping processing central and clients only requesting data and receiving results the ability to expand and update the software and hardware running a business procedure is greatly simplified.
Protection of Intellectual Property
If your business has procedures, algorithms or data that you ultimately need clients to be able to use, services are likely to be the answer. You keep control of the algorithms and the data on your own systems but allow users to request results from them. This keeps the Intellectual Property where it belongs, with you.
Talk to us about how we can help you share your technology and maintain its security.
What Service Oriented Architecture really means
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a way of creating interoperable components of a system in a manner that allows ease of expansion and for consumption of them.
SOA is another a step forward from the concepts of modular and Object Oriented Programming (OOP). It allows the idea of loosely coupled components (possibly from a number of different suppliers) to be brought together to create a complete system that communicates via messages.
eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has become a de facto standard as the wrapper that messages are formatted in. However, for certain situations custom encoded binary representations of the messages can be used.
What part Windows Communication Foundation plays
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is an element of the Microsoft .NET framework and is dedicated to communications. WCF services can be developed in any programming language that targets the .NET common language run time.
WCF is designed in accordance to SOA principles and in such a way any product can consume services offered by WCF.
WCF allows configurable endpoints that can all work on different protocol stacks. For example, a service designed with WCF may be offered to consumers in a format using HTTPS and XML as a web service but also directly over TCP/IP using a custom binary encoding.