Introduction

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has succeeded in providing agile and flexible infrastructures in very large enterprise organizations and is now finding a new application in small to medium-size businesses (SMBs). SMBs face unique integration challenges since business models are more likely to focus on straightforward business-to-business integration with partners and customers. The only way for SMBs to achieve benefits like their larger counterparts is to move beyond inflexible and costly integration methods to implement loosely coupled Web services for SOA.

SMB B-2-B Integration Through Web Services

The proliferation of the Internet and World Wide Web has transformed the business model of the SMB. Having moved beyond basic Web capabilities, SMBs now look to leverage the Internet for business interactions with other groups, including customers, suppliers and partners. Alternative approaches, like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), have been predominantly unavailable for SMBs, because they require significant setup and maintenance costs. SMBs can now use the Internet to connect directly to other companies at a fraction of the cost with Web-based integration as well as Internet-based B2B integration.

Web services have become the preferred approach to enabling Internet-based integration between SMBs and other companies. Web services are software interfaces based on a set of widely accepted standards. By supporting such standards, companies can interoperate with other firms that also support the same standards, easily facilitating interactions. SMBs have specifically benefited from using Web services within their company structure, because they can now integrate with other organizations for B2B interaction without expanding their small IT environments and straining their budgets.

Architecture in the SMB: Loosely Coupled Web Services

In order for SMBs to take full advantage of Web services, their enterprises must move beyond the simple requirements of Web services-based integration and create an architecture that provides for the loose coupling of services in a SOA.

SMBs can leverage various approaches to Web services. Usually, SMBs can rely on the capabilities of HTTP, the underlying Web protocol that facilitates interaction necessary for simple authentication or SSL security. A portion of HTTP traffic utilizes the Representation State Transfer (REST) approach. REST is a simplistic Web services approach based on HTTP and has been an adequate method for some SMBs, while others find REST too limiting in its point-to-point integration. The most widely used protocol for Web services has been Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). SOAP also runs on HTTP, while simultaneously supporting numerous standards, such as security, reliability and other value-added capabilities. SOAP has been the most unifying, generic option for SMBs, promoting the best interoperation between companies. However, even in SOAP-based Web services, there is still a need for an architecture that provides for loose coupling of Web services.

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