SOA, AJAX AND WEB SERVICES
A software architecture has a strong impact on your business. With modern architectures, IT has become a business process enabler. SOA and Web services are key components of today’s IT. Let’s consider the implications.An SOA application is a collection of Web services that can be used to compose solutions for end-to-end business processes. These software services are much more “finely grained” than current monolithic applications. They correspond to basic components of business processes. Open standards allow them to communicate with each other, no matter how they are implemented and on which computer systems they run; these standards consequently reduce the risks when deploying and developing integration solutions. Additionally, Web services use firewall-friendly communication protocols: HTTP, FTP, SOAP Web services and TCP.
As for AJAX, it combines the advantages of zero-client Web architectures with the old client-server architectures. Users experience a “rich user interface” as in client-server systems, but no software has to be installed and maintained on their PCs or PDA’s.
THE SELLIGENT ARCHITECTURE
The Selligent CRM business functionality has been implemented as a native SOA. Each “business object” corresponds to a Web service. The different services of the Selligent X@ Business Server communicate with each other, just as they are open to communication with outside Web services, for example, from ERP systems or other applications.The most heavily used services can be replicated on different servers to provide more performance. That is, we can simply and intelligently provide load balancing.
We also added mechanisms of our own invention to make load balancing really simple and secure (making sure that transactions are properly executed). Our streaming mechanism makes sure that you do not lose transactions in either case. And our object pooling mechanism creates pre-initialised in-memory objects that reduce latency when Web services are accessed for the first time.
Furthermore, using AJAX, Selligent X@ offers a user interface that is just as rich and responsive as that of a traditional client-server application.
You will find additional information on the Selligent X@ architecture in the corresponding leaflet and in our white paper available here.
