SOA

Throughout the IT industry, the elemental requirement of all clients is a product that is high on functionality and low on cost. At Icreon, we cater to our clients’ demands for an efficient and economically marginalized end product by implementing the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. Industry experts consider SOA, to be an architecture that has the capacity to revolutionize the entire application development process. It does so by providing a common platform that establishes a link, in the form of messages, between existing business processes (software services), regardless of their developmental backgrounds such as platform, OS, architecture, etc.

The idea is to loosely couple software services in order to make them inter-operational which is done based on a formal contract that completely hides the developmental backgrounds of the services.  Simply expressed, at Icreon we have a repository of well established and well-tested software services and our product engineers have mastered the art of developing ad-hoc software solutions by orchestrating the software services in the repository.  As a result of implementation of the SOA paradigm, Icreon has been able to develop several seamless applications with simple interfaces combining various functionally gigantic applications.  At Icreon, we take software reusability to the next level.

The SOA architecture, although seemingly complex, actually consists of three basic building blocks: Service provider, service broker, and service requestor.  Each service in the global pool can take on any of these roles depending upon the end – product. The service provider, as the name suggests, takes on the responsibilities comparable to that of the server in the client-server architecture.  All the services available in the service pool are listed and furthermore, all services that can be applied to a particular application development process and those that can be utilized in a better way elsewhere are tracked. The service provider also manages the trade-offs involved between security and availability of services. Over and above, it is the responsibility of the service provider to decide upon the trading partner agreement. The service requestor requests for the services listed in the service registry (pool) of service provider with the help of service broker which presents the interface and access information of the services offered by a service provider.

Implemented to perfection, Icreon has managed to show impressive results in terms of cost efficiency, delivery time and many other important aspects, bringing you benefits that no one else can provide.

At the Icreon R&D labs, our development engineers implement SOA using :

Web Services
.NET Remoting

SOA Solutions

An SOA implementation can be demonstrated in a web based retail store management solution that we have developed for a client. Retail chains can manage and oversee the functioning of their various stores. Stores can make use of the application to streamline and integrate their day-to-day activities such as sales, order processing, inventory management etc, into a single consolidates unit.

Our client was using a custom ERP application installed on their server; our solution was required to work with this ERP application. All data was to be fetched and made available to the local servers being used at individual stores. Similarly all store data was to be sent to the main server. Data is fetched and returned using MSMQ (Microsoft Messaging Queue), a Windows component that provides a means for disparate applications to communicate. MSMQ has also been used to allow different stores to exchange information with each other.

You can browse through the case study for more information about the project.