Service implementation

SOA gained popularity due to its implementation of services, which are accessible over standard internet protocols that are independent of OS platforms and programming languages.

Services from a developer POV are nothing but web services hosted on a web server, and which use SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) or JSON for communication. It's interesting to know that a web service can be used as a wrapper for legacy systems for making them network-enabled.

Some of the popular technologies implementing services (SOA) are as follows:

• Web services based on WSDL (Web Service Description Language) and SOAP
• Messaging, for example, with ActiveMQ, JMS, and RabbitMQ
• WCF (Microsoft's implementation of Web services)
• Apache Thrift
• SORCER
• RESTful HTTP

Service-Oriented Architecture started gaining momentum when the Monolithic architectural approach experience proved to be more painful than thought earlier. Let's briefly understand what Monolithic systems are and their drawbacks that led to adoption of SOA.