SOA Alternatives

Introduction to SOA Alternatives

SOA is often called as Service Oriented Architecture which is a software design model that enables in establishing a common protocol of communicating or establishing information exchange across different applications. The main principle of implementing SOA alternatives is that it does not depend on any technology or specification or product or vendor or any application. It works independently based on a common medium of message exchanging format. SOA was initially used in the year 1988. There have been a lot of alternatives nowadays for the Service Oriented Architecture.

SOA: SOA is a technology independent software design that gives more flexibility in developing multiple applications in multiple technologies based on their requirement and the best possible and efficient technologies and its features can be utilized according to the complexity of requirements. It provides interoperable services and provides software components, legacy systems, and the message processing features into a unique blend of paradigm.

List of the best SOA Alternatives

Now we will look into different SOA alternatives which are as follows:

1. Microservices

Microservices is an architectural model that is used to develop the applications based on the design structure and it makes the application as loosely coupled independent services. In the microservices architecture, all the application services are lightweight and are easy to develop and maintain. It is an architectural pattern in the area of software design. It enables the continuous integration, delivery, and refactoring of the application in an easier manner. The applications will be of small in its size and complexity. It provides a focused model on a unique business requirement.

Microservices architecture development involves multiple numbers of technologies and can be used as an alternative to the Service Oriented Architecture. Microservices architecture can be considered as a special alternative to the Service Oriented Architecture. The cost of maintenance can be reduced, the load distribution can be correctly maintained, the performance of the application can be increased, provides reusability. There are different categories that can be applied such as Infrastructure, Software or Data as a Service.

2. Web Services

The Web Services based on the standard specifications such as HTTP, SOAP, XML etc. The interaction of different web applications is based on the standards of messaging format. The web services are generally XML format based and all the exchange of information is based on XML messages. The web services can interact with each other which were developed based on different technologies and deployed on different servers and are openly available over the internet and depends on the access mechanism.

This is the best SOA alternatives as web services have different components like XML and HTTP together. The different components involved are SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration). The XML is used to tag the data, SOAP is used to transfer the message to a different medium WSDL is used to describe the services based on availability. The different advantages of web services are low-cost operations, interoperable services, standard protocols and specifications, loosely coupled, easy to maintain, RPC support. The different roles of Web Services are Service Provider which is the web service provider, Service Requestor which is a web service consumer and Service Registry which is a centralized service directory to identify the services.

 3. RESTful Services

The RESTful services are web services based on the REST (Representational state transfer) architecture. The RESTful web services are normally highly scalable, lightweight, and easily maintainable. RESTful services are commonly used to create APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for any web-based applications. RESTful services are based on web standards and specifications which uses HTTP protocol and its standard methods. The different types of HTTP methods which can be used along with RESTful services are GET, POST, PUT, DELETE etc.

The RESTful services are usually and mostly popularly develop using Java Programming language. The RESTful services always treat any content on its service as a resource. The format of message representation of RESTful service is JSON, text, XML etc. The medium of communication between the client and the server is an HTTP protocol. The message exchange will be in the form of HTTP request and response which can also be authenticated using any security method. A HTTP request normally contains a request header, request body, URI, verb, HTTP version. An HTTP response normally contains a response header, response body, response code, and HTTP version. All the available different methods of HTTP can be used in the RESTful services.

4. Messaging Services

The Messaging services are also called Message Brokers or Messaging Queues which is a kind of architectural patterns for the purpose of message transformation, validation and routing efficiently and effectively. The different types of messaging systems are JMS, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, etc. JMS (Java Message Service API) is a Java-based messaging system for transmitting messages among multiple clients. ActiveMQ is an Apache-based message broker for Java-based applications to establish communication between client and server efficiently. RabbitMQ is also a message broker which is open source-based and message-oriented middleware. The latest messaging system with high fault tolerance and scalability is Kafka which is Apache-based application. The messaging services enable the establishment of communication among different applications or components.

The messaging systems enable loosely coupled applications, provides reliability and asynchronous transmission features. The Messaging services provide complete coordination among the distributed applications. The benefits of Messaging services are improved performance, scalability, decoupling of various services, easy development, maintenance and migration to serverless components. The different Messaging services available apart from the above are Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Queue Service (SQS), IBM MQ, JBoss MQ, Open Message Queue, Oracle Message Broker, TIBCO, SAP PI, Microsoft Azure Service Bus.

Comparisons Of SOA Alternatives

Following are the top comparisons of SOA Alternatives:

Features	SOA	Microservices	Web Services	RESTful Services	Messaging Services
Pricing	Free	Free	Free	Free	Depends on the application server
Message Format	XML	Depends on technology (XML/JSON)	SOAP-based WSDL (XML)	JSON	Depends on messaging service and mostly based on text
Security Features	Yes	Yes (depends on provider)	Yes	Yes (third party)	Depends on server
Technology Stack	Less	More compared to SOA	Less	Less	More
Scalability	Less	More	More	More	Depends on server

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This has been a guide to SOA Alternatives. Here we have discussed the concept and List of Best SOA Alternatives along with their features. You may also look at the following articles to learn more:

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