Service oriented architectures: approaches, technologies and research issues

TLDR

Service‑oriented architectures (SOA) provide a loosely coupled, standards‑based, protocol‑independent framework for distributed computing, relying on an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to integrate heterogeneous components and support diverse communication patterns. This paper reviews SOA technologies that integrate event‑based programming, examines ESB functions, and proposes an extended SOA (xSOA) model to address orchestration, routing, provisioning, integrity, security, and service management. The authors introduce an extended SOA (xSOA) layered architecture that classifies research issues and current activities, and they analyze ESB capabilities such as orchestration, intelligent routing, provisioning, integrity, security, and service management.

Abstract

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) is an emerging approach that addresses the requirements of loosely coupled, standards-based, and protocol- independent distributed computing. Typically business operations running in an SOA comprise a number of invocations of these different components, often in an event-driven or asynchronous fashion that reflects the underlying business process needs. To build an SOA a highly distributable communications and integration backbone is required. This functionality is provided by the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that is an integration platform that utilizes Web services standards to support a wide variety of communications patterns over multiple transport protocols and deliver value-added capabilities for SOA applications. This paper reviews technologies and approaches that unify the principles and concepts of SOA with those of event-based programing. The paper also focuses on the ESB and describes a range of functions that are designed to offer a manageable, standards-based SOA backbone that extends middleware functionality throughout by connecting heterogeneous components and systems and offers integration services. Finally, the paper proposes an approach to extend the conventional SOA to cater for essential ESB requirements that include capabilities such as service orchestration, "intelligent" routing, provisioning, integrity and security of message as well as service management. The layers in this extended SOA, in short xSOA, are used to classify research issues and current research activities.