Example Of Term Paper On The Service-Oriented Architecture

1.0. Reducing (TCO) Total Cost of Ownership through SOA
There are ways that are adopted in order to reduce the cost of ownership through (SOA) service-oriented architecture. Some of the measures that come as a result of using SOA include; lowering the market cost, reducing the time to market, increasing agility and ensuring the application is consistent (Mason et al., 2010). Furthermore, SOA increases the usability, value, maintainability and ensuring lower redundancy. Many scholars have conducted forensic studies concerning SOA development, implementation and administration using different integrations with other systems such as SaaS, Oracle and enterprise technologies to ensure reduction of TCO (Mason et al., 2010). Five ways employed to this effect include; increased reuse, managing risk, decreased integration expense, maintaining application consistency and Agility.
1.0.1 Increased reuse
In order to increase ROI adoption of reuse method must be excised with a steady growth in revenue from the products and investment in IT. When resources are transformed and reused, it makes it easier to manage and save more costs in running the enterprise. Environmental factors are also considered in the process making SOA the best way to go in the modern society (Behara, 2008). With threats like climate change, most organizations and individuals prefer recycling waste materials for the purposes of saving the environment and cost. Government policies come into play when the waste disposals are not properly managed hence attracting greater penalties as well as withdrawal of operation licences.
1.0.2 Managing Risk
Reliance on platform vendors and technology is considered an external risk to any company or organization where it has very little control. Nevertheless, embracing open standards often mitigates this risk whenever used (Albreshne et al., 2009). Preparation for disasters when using enterprise systems is the best in preserving the already existing systems from any internal and external damages. Security threats, fire breakouts and improper use of systems leads to high cost of maintenance and repair. Therefore managing such risks ensures that TCO is reduced by using SOA integrated with other systems to ensure security and other factors taken care of.
1.0.3 Decreased Integration expense
Service orientation encompasses a greater re-structuring of people, process and organization in order to bring into line the new paradigm that is designed to provide efficient and effective services to customers. To influence the capability of technology through service orientation, there must be a re-alignment of business-enabling units, organization sub-units and business units (Behara, 2008). One of the ways to improve business units is to centralize the departments in order to outsource or streamline processes as an external integration and simpler. Run time cost can be lowered by using GUI-based applications when integrating into SOA based system at a lower cost and simplicity.
1.0.4 Maintaining application consistency
The enterprise application has to be consistent to increase customer trust and enhance high productivity for sufficient supply. With an organized system, it is possible to have low maintenance cost, hence decreasing the TCO since less expenses will be incurred while more income taken into account. Time to market the products and services is lowered as well with easy to maintain system. SAO implementation is very easy to build and cheaper to maintain as compared to old systems that were adopted by several companies (Behara, 2008). With a consistent application, employees as well as developers have prior knowledge of the system making it much easier to manage and control. There are not additional costs when it comes to training and transfer of knowledge from one person to another.
1.0.5 Agility
A business enterprise that uses loose coupling method often reduces time to market and increases the application agility both for new and old applications that has embrace it. Scalability can also be achieved with ease and low cost. However, integration issues can be solved through service orientation and the TCO lowered with the value of money spent taken into account. Web services approaches such as top-up, meet-in-the-middle and bottom-up can be embraced to achieve agility (Behara, 2008). Bottom-up is currently being abandoned while new technology takes shape in many organizations. Legacy systems often used bottom-up approaches to cost of implementation but the same will not be used when adopting new enterprises such as oracle.
1.0.6 Benefits of SOA Solution

Lower project implementation costs achieved though standardized tools, methodologies and best practices as compared to old systems.

Cheaper maintenance and production costs achieved by eliminating redundancy within the integrated SOA architecture.
Cheaper integration professional resource costs
Abridged project risks experienced during implementation of organizations’ integration strategies.
Capitalize on reuse of interfaces, resources, processes, systems and services.
Enhanced delivery time
1.0.7 Limitations of using SOA
There are quite a number of limitations that comes along with change in technology. Monotonous service orientation often leads to more granularities a situation that ends up increasing maintenance costs. Correspondingly, much less granularity ends up limiting re-use therefore becoming inflexible.

Service orientation performed without appropriate governance processes taken into account may lead to a disordered mesh of organization IT assets.

Implementing adherence to the already defined governance processes might be great challenge in case it is not efficiently done leading to a much less SOA benefits.

Consensus on financial models specifically on cost sharing and revenue is a big challenge when using SOA.

2.0. Information and data exchange between servers and clients through web services
Many enterprises have embraced investments in system resources for many years. Such kinds of enterprises have huge amount of stored data and records in the legacy (EIS) enterprise information systems (Albreshne et al., 2009). Therefore, discarding existing systems is now practical at all. However, it is more economical to enhance and evolve EIS. Considering the data and information exchange by using Web services software may be easy and cost effective. Web services enhance interoperable machine-to-machine communication over a more secure network. In order to achieve this, a set of XML-based standards such as SOAP, UDDI and WSDL are used (Albreshne et al., 2009). These standards make it easy to define, publish and apply web services. The figure 2.0.1 below illustrates how xml is used to enhance communication between servers and clients.
Figure 2.0.1 Use of XML in enhancing web communication services
Enterprise Edition 1.4 and Java 2 Platform can be used when developing state-of-the-art web services in order to implement SOA. Enterprise Edition 1.4 platform allows one to build or deploy web services within the application server platform. Web services are run by XML, SOAP, UDDI and WSDL technologies (Albreshne et al., 2009). When building a Web service, the developers must create its definition to take the form of a WSDL document used in describing the functionality of the service provides and the service's location as administered on the Web. However, the information concerning the service is transferred to a UDDI registry that permits Web service customers to locate the services required. Nonetheless, this step is non-compulsory though it is beneficial when any company desires that its Web services be revealed by external or internal service customers. Centered on information within UDDI registry, most client developer for the Web services uses the instructions within WSDL to create SOAP messages for the exchange of data over HTTP (Behara, 2008).
2.1. XML (eXtensible Markup Language)
XML is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) measurement that outlines a meta-language for labeling data. Considering the XML applications, the data is classified by the surrounding that has text-based tags and customizable that gives more information about the data along with its hierarchical structure (Cavanaugh, 2006). For the reason that XML syntax comprises of text-based mark-up used in describing the data that is being attach a label to, it is both human readable and application-independent. This interoperability and simplicity have abetted XML in achieving a widespread adoption and acceptance as the standard used for exchanging information across heterogeneous systems with modern day Web services, variety of applications and XML-based technologies. Considering the fact that XML forms the foundation of modern day Web services, their interfaces and encoded messages are created using –based technologies that any machine is able to interpret (Cavanaugh, 2006).
2.2. Integrating XML Technologies into SOA
      XML's strength is meant to manipulate and describe complex data. Considering a successful implementation such as JUNO Script API, it encodes data with both request and replies at the same time in the W3C's (XML) Extensible Markup Language (Cavanaugh, 2006). However, XML's simple encoding permits the representation of all the arbitrary hierarchies of data provided they are using ASCII codes or text in HTML-like tags. On the other hand, the structure and order of the elements are defined by either using XML Schemas or (DTDs) Document Type Definitions.   XML technologies are also present with many more advantages for a much better system integration and data management from disparate sources. A more flexible link can be used between the management application and the managed object where tighter interoperability are included among management applications received from different Suppliers. It is powerful and easy to transform and render management information where centralized and automatic management data validation is done. With a dynamic e-business, SOA can integrate with XML to produce a more efficient system that can serve both vendor and client alike with easy and simplicity.
3.0. Differences of a tightly and a loosely coupled architecture
Loose Coupling denotes the reduction of dependencies of a given class that uses a completely different class directly. However, tight coupling, objects and classes are considered dependent on each other. Factually, tight coupling is normally bad since it reduces re-usability and flexibility of code making changes that impedes testability and becomes much more difficult (Behara, 2008).
On the other hand, a loosely coupled system is easily broken down in order to form definable elements. The level of coupling within a system can only be measured by means of plotting the maximum number of changes on the element that occur with or without adverse effects (Cavanaugh, 2006). On the other hand, a tightly coupled object always need to know about other related objects but are normally dependent on one another’s interfaces. For any change to take place for a single object within a tightly coupled application, quite a number of changestakes place to a number of other objects. However, in smaller applications, the changes can be noticed easily with a minimal chance of not seeing anything. However, with large applications, inter-dependencies are unknown by every programmer with a chance of overlooking any changes (Cavanaugh, 2006). The table 3.0.1 below shows the differences between a tightly and a loosely coupled system.

In most distributed systems, both loosely and tightly coupled SOAs and systems access files over the network, access the web, access printers, receives video and audio files and mail transfers. With an integrated SOA, tightly coupled system uses multi processors making them work faster than the loosely coupled systems (Cavanaugh, 2006).
4.0. Benefits and limitations of standard based integration
4.1 Benefits
4.1.1 Regulation

• Includes handling government requirements and regulatory with ease

• Offers improved corporate governance visibility
• Promotes well-integrated systems that facilitate mergers and acquisition by providing a better view of process, information and data.
• It automates or reduces data duplication processes and errors.
4.1.2 SOA
• The integration performs an essential role by converting an enterprise landscape into a standard SOA enabled infrastructure. On the other hand, SOA offers substantial benefits to the enterprise by improving business process efficiency, visibility and accountability among many others.
• It provides the functional and organization view with vital evidences on application redundancies. However, it enhances a better consolidation for all applications within the whole IT landscape.
4.1.3 Agility

• It provides a better alignment of IT with intended business goals and objectives

• It responds rapidly to new and upcoming business opportunities
• It improves businesses by getting more competitive advantage over others
• It handles the entire launch of new services and products at the same time managing the existing ones
4.1.4 Reuse

• Facilitates a better return on investments with the existing applications via data reuse and functionality.

•Reuse often bringing down TCO
4.2 Limitations
Despite the fact that the development of EAI solution is quite challenging, maintaining and operating such solutions is more daunting. With the integration of technologies alongside the distributed EAI solutions, monitoring, trouble-shooting and deploying complex tasks becomes much easier since they necessitate a combination of skill sets. However, these skill sets may not exist within the IT operations of an organization or within the individuals.
Prevailing XML Web Services standards are often considered as a fraction of the main integration challenges such as repeated assertion that XML is a ‘Lingua franca” within the integrated system is to a certain extent misleading. By conducting data standardization exchange into XML, the documents are all written using a common alphabet, for instance the Roman alphabet (Mason et al., 2010). Notwithstanding the fact that the alphabet is more common, the same is continuously used when representing many dialects and languages that cannot be easily understood by all readers. This attribute is similar with enterprise integration where the presence of a common presentation such as XML does not point toward common semantics. There is common impression of “account” having many different connotations, semantics, assumptions and constraints in each partaking system. However, resolving the semantic differences encountered between systems also proves to be a time-consuming and difficult task since it involves important technical and business decisions.
Despite the fact that there is a wide-spread demand for integration solutions, few standards have been established so far within this domain (Mason et al., 2010). The introduction of XSL, Web services and XML unquestionably marked the most important advance of standards-based features within an integrated solution. Nonetheless, the publicity around Web services as integration has given more grounds to the new fragmentation within the marketplace, culminating in a flurry of new “interpretations” and “extensions” of the standards. With this in mind, the absence of interoperability in between “standards-compliant” is a major stumbling block when it comes to offering sophisticated technical solution to any system integration.

References

Albreshne, A., Fuhrer, P., Pasquier, J. (2009). Web Services Technologies: State of the Art. Available at: < http://diuf.unifr.ch/drupal/softeng/sites/diuf.unifr.ch.drupal.softeng/files/file/publications/internal/WP09-04.pdf >
Behara, G.K. (2008). Service Integration. Available at: < http://www.bptrends.com/publicationfiles/10-08-ART-SOA and Integration-Gopola-final.doc.pdf>
Cavanaugh, E. (2006). Web services: Benefits, challenges, and a unique, visual development solution. Available at: < http://www.altova.com/whitepapers/webservices.pdf >
Mason, R.T., Ellis, T.J. (2010). A Recommendation for the Use of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to Bridge the LMS to LOR Data Movement Interoperability Gap for Education. Available at: < http://proceedings.informingscience.org/InSITE2010/InSITE10p043-056Mason711.pdf >