System Integration

The final topic is for group reflective study using the wiki tool in CSU Interact and a way for you to add a final reflective comment on systems integration and make your closing remarks to your Developers blog.

1.Choose ONE of the four ways to manage and develop integrated systems as listed below;

I chose "portal and service-oriented architectures (SOA)" to manage and develop integrated systems.

2.Summarise your understanding and describe its relevance (250 words max) in either your study at university or in your work environment;

SOA as an architecture relies on service-orientation as its fundamental design principle. If a service presents a simple interface that abstracts away its underlying complexity, users can access independent services without knowledge of the service's platform implementation. Barry (n.d.) defines that ‘a SOA is essentially a collection of services. These services communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. Some means of connecting services to each other is needed. Today, SOA and Web services become very popular but it is not something new. The first SOA for many people in the past was with the use DCOM or Object Request Brokers (ORBs) based on the CORBA specification.

I just put aside the principles and technical requirements of SOA and only refer to the above definition when illustrating how SOA is adopted in the system design at my workplace. The essential applications including (email, financial system, intranet, office applications and documents) are unified on the web portal via a single interface illustrated in Fig.1.

Fig.1

It provides a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether. Behind the simple interface, there are complexities and depencies associated with the applications. Take Citrix as a good example, it is very different from other applications accessible through the portal. It actually takes you to an independent platform and users need to install the local Crtrix client prior to accessing it. From this perspective, it achieves the principle of 'loose coupling',

A small set of simple and ubiquitous interfaces to all participating software agents. Only generic semantics are encoded at the interfaces. The interfaces should be universally available for all providers and consumers (He 2003).

Of course, there are still many principles of SOA but I have no intention detail them here. I just attempt to put SOA in this context.

References
Barry, D n.d., Service-oriented architecture (SOA) definition, Barry & Associate, viewed 20 June 2009, <http://www.service-architecture.com/web-services/articles/service-oriented_architecture_soa_definition.html>.

He, H 2003, What Is Service-Oriented Architecture, posted 30 Sep, O'Reilly Media, Inc, viewed 21 June 2009, <http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2003/09/30/soa.html>