Service Oriented Architecture – Basics

SOA – Service Oriented Architecture – is an architectural design pattern, where an application is developed as a set of logically & functionally separate and independent services. Each of these services can be implemented in any platform, programming language using any of the available technologies. These services can communicate with each other to fulfill their needs and can send & receive pieces of information from other services as well. One service can interact with more than one service to get the desired things done. SOA can be implemented using web services, since the protocols & standards of internet are very much platform & programming language independent. The main purpose of SOA is to reduce the coupling between the modules.

Requirements of SOA
1) We should make use of standards & protocols supported by most of the platforms since these services may be distributed among wide verity of them. (Means, there should be a standard and widely accepted mechanism for the services to talk with each other)
2) There should be a “clear & unambiguous” service interface syntax.
3) There should be a service registry mechanism to retrieve the suitable services.

SOA Building Blocks
Service provider: Provides a set of services to the requesting clients/services. The provider can restrict the services they offer as well as define the service scope to public or private. Public services can be accessed by anyone over the internet but the private services are restricted to certain clients. The service provider should register the interface & service access information with the service registry.

Service Broker/Service Registry: Provides the interface & service access information to any service requestors. The implementer can also decide the scope of the registry too.

Service requestor: It’s a web service client. The requester searches the service registry using different search methods to find a service entry and then binds to the corresponding service provider to get the things done.

Useful links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture
http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2003/09/30/soa.html
http://www.service-architecture.com/

Google Acquires Jaiku

Recently Google has made yet another acquisition. They have added Jaiku as a part of Google. Jaiku is one of the most popular micro-blogging services on the internet. Jaiku was formed in February 2006 in Helsinki by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen.

Useful links
Jaiku Blog: http://www.jaiku.com/blog/

Long Running Web Process (LRWP) in the Java Platform using GlassFish

Today while surfing the net I found this article in Sun’s website. I thought this will be useful to some of us. According to the web site, LRWP is,

“The Long Running Web Process (LRWP) is a protocol used by a web server to communicate with its peers. LRWP is similar to CGI, but faster, since the peer is persistent across requests. In LRWP, a TCP connection is established between the LRWP peer and a LRWP agent. The LRWP agent could be the web container or a process running within the web container and the LRWP peer could be any process running on a network. The LRWP peer at connection registers the web context that the peer is interested in. The web context could be any context, such as “/osp”, “/tep”, or “/cgi-bin” itself. When a request for that context is made, the agent transfers the input to the LRWP peer and sends the output from the peer back to the web client. The LRWP agent should also be able to support multiple peers concurrently, and each peer makes a connection and registers the context it is interested in. “

You can read this article here.

Internet Explorer 7 Update

Microsoft recently released a new build of IE7 for Windows XP/2003 server. This latest build can be downloaded from the IE home page, http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx. There are minor changes in the user experience level too.

New enhanced Microsoft Live Search

Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, said Windows Live search is now on an even technology footing with offerings from rival search engines after years of playing catch-up since it started developing its own Web search in 2003.

Its new presentation is in line with an industry trend to step beyond traditional text links, with unified search results that offer Web sites, news, pictures and video on one page. Rivals Google Inc and Ask.com made similar changes this year, and Yahoo Inc is moving in that direction.

“Microsoft is realistic. It doesn’t think it’s going to wake up tomorrow and overtake Google,” said Allen Weiner, an analyst at research firm Gartner. “Right now, Microsoft wants to establish itself more firmly with its existing users.”

Source: tech2.com