Consider SOA For Your New Website

If you are beginning the process to rebuild your website or have an opportunity to rebuild parts of it, you may want to consider a service oriented architecture (SOA).

A common approach to website development is to build pages with all the graphics, content, and fields you would expect along with all the programming/logic to pull data from a database, access information from an external systrem, or calculate a number from user input. This is considered a monolithic architecture and has a number of drawbacks, specifically reuse.

Since logic is being programmed right into a page, when that logic needs to be used in another part of the website, it will need to be copied to the other pages. This causes a problem when it comes time to make changes to a specific logic. The logic now needs to be changed in several locations instead of just one. Multiply this for several hundred logics across a thousand pages and the problem gets out of hand quickly (we call this a scalability issue).

An SOA approach to website development is about separation of concerns and isolating business logic from application logic (not to be confused with separation of code from content which is also supremely important). This means the logic used to pull data from a database, make calls to an external system, and do calculations is separated out from the rest of the website in what is called a 'service layer'. Web pages, in what is called the 'application layer', make calls to the service layer to retrieve or process information.This isolation of logic, separate from the pages, allows for the reuse of the logic across many pages.

Now there are many other aspects that go into taking a service oriented architecture and their are several others ways to factor logic out of pages. What is important is that the discussion of software architecture is taking place with some degree of emphasis and sophistication and an SOA approach is a great place to start.