Course: Service Oriented Architecture

Course Code: IS434

SOA Introduction and Basics

Presented by:
Dr. Dina Ezzat

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Outline
• What is a Service?
• What is a Software Architecture?
• What is Service Oriented Architecture?
• What is a Service in Service Oriented Architecture?
• Elements of a Service
• Properties of a Service
• Drivers/Benefits of Services
• Common Misconceptions about Service Definition

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What is a Service?
• A service is something useful a provider makes for a
consumer.

• Services are paid for.

• Services can be simple like fixing a chair.

• However, there are more complex services such as fixing a

laptop.

• These complex services are composed of other services.

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Elements of a Service
• A service has certain elements in order to be well defined and
usable.

• It has three components:

1. Interface
2. Contract
3. Implementation

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Example
• Suppose you go to a restaurant to have breakfast.
• The restaurant offers a menu that contains all its food and
drink items.
• The figure shows the contract for the breakfast, the interface
(English menu and waitress Jane) and the implementation.

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Contract
• When entering the restaurant, a waiter explains the breakfast
components and ingredients.

• The breakfast is available from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. and it costs 30

LE.

• You can pay by credit card or cash, but only in Egyptian

pounds.

• The waitress informs you that breakfast will be served in five

to ten minutes.

• Quality, price, order time, etc. are examples of important

factors of the breakfast that a consumer cares about. 6
 Interface
• The interface is the way you interact with a service.

• To order breakfast you interact with:

➢ Jane (waitress).
➢ The menu that is in English.

• These are two channels of the interface.

• A channel is a route of communication.

• There are two different ways to communicate the items of the menu.

• To know what items the customer can order, he/she can check the
menu or through asking the waitress Jane. 7
Implementation
• A customer is not interested in the implementation.

• The customer does not need to know how the restaurant

prepares his/her meal.

• What a customer cares about is that the breakfast is according

to his/her expectations.

• For example:
➢ Is there on time.
➢ Costs no more than written on the menu.

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Consumer and Provider
• There are two main parties of interest:
1. Customer ordering the breakfast.
2. The restaurant providing the breakfast.

• Dealing with lots of service providers:

➢ If you want to have breakfast in an unknown city, you might
search in Yellow Pages to check the list of all breakfast places.

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Reuse of Breakfast Service
• Many people have breakfast at this restaurant.

• A service is reused if a service has several consumers.

• Why reuse
• Benefits of reuse
• An important factor for achieving reuse is that future
customers trust the quality of the service and agree with the
conditions under which it is provided.
• Which are: contract and interface.

• If consumers do not agree with the terms provided, they will

use services from another restaurant/provider.
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What is SOA?

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Software Architecture
• Software architecture refers to the fundamental structures of
a software system and the way of creating such structures and
systems.

• Each structure comprises:

➢ Software elements.
➢ Relations among them.
➢ Properties of both elements and relations.

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Software Architecture Example

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Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural style
that supports service orientation.

• Service orientation is a way of thinking in terms of services

and service-based development and the outcomes of services.

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Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
(Cont.)
• A service is a unit of functionality that can be accessed
remotely and executed and updated independently.

• For example: retrieving a credit card statement online.

• Services are the basic building blocks in a service oriented

architecture.

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Examples of Services
• Payment.

• Booking a hotel.

• Shipping service.

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Examples of SOA
• A website using payment service like PayPal integration.

• An e-commerce website using a service for shipment of

products.

• What else

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Service
• A service is a self-contained unit of software that performs a
specific task.
• Examples of services

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Service Interface
• It is the way consumers can interact with services.

• The interface defines how a service provider will perform

requests from a service consumer.

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 Service Contract
• The most basic interaction in SOA is between service providers
and service consumers.

• For each interaction between these two parties, one provides

some combination of data and functionality and the other
consumes it.

• Before the provider can provide whatever the service offers, the
two parties must come to an agreement, or contract, that
specifies the details of the service the provider is performing.

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Service Contract (Cont.)
• Contracts should describe functional requirements
➢ The contract should define what functionality the provider
provides and what data it will return.

• Contracts must also specify nonfunctional requirements

➢ Not what the service does, but the way in which it goes about
its business.

• Contracts also specify the rules of engagement between

consumers and providers, known as policies, that govern who
can access a provider, what security procedures the
participants must follow, and any other rules that apply to the
exchange.
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Service Implementation
• The implementation is the actual service code.

• Because the interface of a service is separate from its

implementation, a service provider can execute a request
without the service consumer knowing how it does so; the
service consumer only worries about consuming services.

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 Elements of a Service
• The contract and interface are visible to the outside world.

• The implementation is hidden or a black box to consumers.

• Consumers don’t care about the service implementation.

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Properties of a Service
• A service has four properties according to one of many
definitions of SOA:

1. It logically represents a repeatable business activity with a

specified outcome.
2. It is self-contained.
3. It is a black box for its consumers, meaning the consumer
does not have to be aware of the service’s inner workings.
4. It may be composed of other services.

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Drivers/Benefits of Services

• Flexibility:
➢ Services are small building blocks with a clear set of
capabilities.
➢ Easier to support the changing requirements of the
organization.

• Cost reduction:
➢ Reusing a service is cheaper than building and maintaining
duplicate functionality.
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Drivers/Benefits of Services (Cont.)
• Shorter time to market:
➢ By reusing services, functionality can be provided faster, thus
reducing the time to market.

• Increase in quality:
➢ Because more consumers use a service, it is better tested.
➢ Since it is better tested, so the service quality increases.

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Common Misconceptions about
Service Definition
• Every service is a web service.
What is a web service
➢ While a service can be implemented as a web service, it can
also be a SQL procedure or a .NET class containing methods.
➢ The use of web services and web service standards does help
to achieve interoperability.

• Consumers of services are always IT systems.

➢ Not all services are accessed by a system.
➢ An automated service can have a graphical user interface
accessed by humans such as employees and customers.

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Question

• Is SOA considered a technology?

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References
• SOA Made Simple, by Lonneke Dikmans and Ronald van
Luttikhuizen, 2012.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_architecture
• https://viniciustavanoferreira.wordpress.com/2019/04/17/softwar
e-engineering-baseline-software-architecture-software-to-
discover-plants-diseases/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture
• https://www.oracle.com/technicalresources/articles/javase/soa.ht
ml
• https://doveltech.com/innovation/what-belongs-in-a-service-
contract/

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Any Questions?

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