{"id":4999,"date":"2023-08-24T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-24T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.se-trends.de\/?p=4999"},"modified":"2023-08-22T10:27:19","modified_gmt":"2023-08-22T08:27:19","slug":"scaling-with-service-oriented-architectures-soa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.se-trends.de\/en\/skalieren-mit-serviceorientierten-architekturen-soa\/","title":{"rendered":"Scaling with service-oriented architectures (SOA)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In today's fast-paced world of software development, flexibility, scalability and reusability are of the utmost importance. This is where service-oriented architecture (SOA) comes into play. SOA allows us to provide encapsulated services with clearly defined, \"RESTful\" interfaces. SOA has many features that enable scalability and robustness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the best-known heads of SOA in Germany was Stefan Tilkov, who died far too young on August 10, 2023. This article is intended to pay tribute to Stefan's achievements in this field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

What is a service-oriented architecture (SOA)?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A service-oriented architecture is a method for developing software in which applications are organized as loosely coupled services. These services are autonomous, independent units that communicate with each other via defined interfaces. SOA promotes the modularity, reusability and scalability of software solutions. These services can be organized like a \"Black Box<\/a>\" should be understood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of monolithic applications, where changes in one part can affect the entire system, SOA-based applications can update individual services without affecting the rest of the application. These services are also called Microservice<\/a> called.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The role of REST in SOA<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One of the best-known architectural principles that can be applied within SOA is the Representational State Transfer (REST)<\/a>. REST is an architectural style based on principles such as resources, statelessness, standardized interfaces and cacheability. A RESTful service offers its functionality via standardized HTTP methods, such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

REST promotes the development of lightweight, scalable and interoperable services. The clear separation between services and their communication allows companies to work more efficiently and react more quickly to changing requirements. RESTful APIs allow applications to communicate with each other without the need for complex integrations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

REST is just one way to implement SOA. SOAP<\/a> and XML-RPC<\/a> are older, but still used alternatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

REST in practice<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

REST can be seen a bit like \"A website for machines\", as it is also based on the same web technologies, in particular HTTP<\/a>. But instead of rendering a user interface and displaying HTML as the result, a REST interface takes machine-readable data as input and output, often JSON<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For testing, we can automatically provide a simple user interface, for example with Swagger<\/a>. Swagger allows us to send data to the service and inspect the result. Swagger is Open Source<\/a>. Many API companies allow users to access the API via Swagger to get to know it. Here, for example, is a pet database online<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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