0

I study SOA and webservices for a science paper. My state of knowledge is, that every SOA architcture needs a service broker.

Webservices are concrete implementations of a SOA, so do they have a service broker after? For example I create a webservice in asp.net which returns "hallo world" By Creating it, do I create a service broker too?

steve
  • 123
  • 1
  • 14

2 Answers2

1

Don't let fool you by answers which are copy paste from Wikipedia :-)

Webservices are concrete implementations of a SOA

This assumption/statement is wrong. At least there is no direct relationship between SOA and webservices. SOA is an architectural paradigm where a webservice is a concrete technology (stack) based on WSDL and its result, the SOAP-protocol. Nothing more. Webservices may help to establish loosely coupled service landscape, which the SOA paradigm expects. But you could also build up a SOA landscape with other technology stacks (self-written hacks, RMI, even based on REST for instance).

Repository

The thing is: When you start building up your SOA-landscape, you (or others) will code services (i.e. webservices) where your service will have a technical contract (WSDL, WADL, ..) as a base for the implementation. Your clients will ask for it and you want it to store somewhere. This somewhere is usually a service repository. You could develop your own one, use the UDDI-standard or just buy one of products by the big vendors (IBM, TIBCO, Oracle etc).

Broker

A message broker within the SOA context is some piece of software, which supports the decoupling of the connected partner systems. Commonly it's called ESB (enterprise service bus). Also one of the goals of the SOA paradigm is, that the services can be used by anyone (reusability). Therefore you don't want to connect your services by P2P-connections (aka spaghetti architecture) - just imagine that one of the service participants changes it's hardware/IP: this would be a nightmare for all the connected partner systems. That's why the ESB was invented which acts between the service consumer and the service provider. Typically, these ESB-products support a lot of technologies or -stacks/APIs like HTTP, JMS, REST etc.

Source: I work with a self-claimed SOA landscape and thousands of different (web-)services for a big company for a long time now.

Aydin K.
  • 3,309
  • 36
  • 44
  • Hey Aydin, can I ask you on this occasion, what RPC has to do with SOA and REST? Is RPC a own implementation opportunity for a WebService or does SOA and REST build up on RPCs? – steve May 29 '15 at 11:31
  • Hey Steve, to be honest I've difficulties to answer this question because the term "RPC" has a lot of different meanings,depending of the context (XML-RPC VS SOAP, RPC vs Document-Style in WSDLs, RPC vs Message oriented architecture - i.e. JMS-driven ).The definition of RPC for it's own means simply that you invoke a method/operation on a remote interface and therefore have a tight coupling with this particular interface. But it's real definition depends on the context.Regarding REST vs (JSON-)RPC check out the top-voted answer here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15056878/rest-vs-json-rpc – Aydin K. May 30 '15 at 09:58
0

A Web service is a set of related application functions that can be programmatically invoked over the Internet. Businesses can dynamically mix and match Web services to perform complex transactions with minimal programming. Web services allow buyers and sellers all over the world to discover each other, connect dynamically, and execute transactions in real time with minimal human interaction.

Web services are self-contained, self-describing modular applications that can be published, located, and invoked across the Web.

A network component in a Web Services architecture can play one or more fundamental roles: service provider, service broker, and service client.

Service brokers register and categorize published services and provide search services. For example, UDDI acts as a service broker for WSDL-described Web services.

Tharif
  • 13,794
  • 9
  • 55
  • 77
  • I know what a Webservice is but I dont get a picture of the Service broker. Im the kind of guy who learns by doing. I wrote about 20 web services over the last weeks, but I did not registered anyone at a service broker. That's why I ask about it. – steve May 28 '15 at 10:14