About SOA
Mule ESB is based on the concept of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The SOA approach to development allows IT organizations to compose applications by building service interfaces around components of applications and exposing those to service consumers. Services are discrete sets of functionality that are completely separate from each other but can work together on a canonical set of objects. For example, if you need to process customer invoices, you might have one service that merges customer data from a database into the invoice and another service that checks the inventory database to see if the items on the invoice are in stock and a third service that fulfills the order.
Because each service stands alone, services can be used as building blocks for multiple processes and do not have to be recreated for each type of process or message. For example, the service that merges customer data onto the invoice could also be used to merge customer data onto statements, letters, or other documents. The logic that determines how the invoice data and customer data are merged is decoupled from the logic that looks up and retrieves the necessary customer data. This modular approach allows you to create functionality once and re-use it as many times as needed, streamlining development.
This decoupling is a key element of service mediation. Mediation is a well-known pattern for promoting loose coupling. In SOA, service mediation also describes the capabilities of the ESB to convert between transport protocols (including the ability to bridge between synchronous and asynchronous protocols), changing the representation of messages by transforming data, and enforcing compliance with policies by taking the necessary steps such as auditing, logging, security monitoring, etc.
Constructing the building blocks into a logical process is called orchestration. Service orchestration using an ESB allows for automation of common backend processes at the application service layer. These processes can be scheduled or exposed as services that are triggered by external events. Service orchestration differs from business process orchestration which may include longer running stateful business processes, complex human interactions and approvals, or parallel execution of those types of processes at the business service layer.
Using SOA, businesses can realize dramatic savings on development costs and can rapidly adapt to changing business conditions by reusing and reconfiguring existing services in developing new applications. SOA also enables better integration of enterprise IT resources, including previously isolated application silos and legacy systems. Mule fully supports the SOA approach and orchestrates communication among the services, allowing you to easily tie all these applications together.
Learn more about the top challenges for SOA firms
and best practices on how to address them.