Overview
Working across companies requires flexibility and the capability to deal with large amounts of information—even when it arrives suddenly.
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to constructing software that meets business requirements by using a set of independent services available on a network. Although software is traditionally built from components, SOA services are very loosely coupled and highly interoperable—increasing reusability. SOA platforms like the GXS Trading Grid are able to leverage completely different technologies (i.e., Java, Microsoft .NET, legacy C/C++ modules) within and between services.
A given service may have multiple interfaces, supporting totally different kinds of access for different applications. An example is a messaging interface for handling a large volume of information coming in on a queue; another example would be a web services interface to respond instantly to a web user accessing a portal.
An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a technology for managing the invocation of services anywhere in the platform both securely and reliably. Services in the GXS Trading Grid are accessed via its ESB, allowing flexible configuration and the addition of new services easily—without disrupting any of the other services.
The Enterprise Service Bus of the GXS Trading Grid also provides a valuable buffering and queuing capability to enable sudden surges of incoming information to be gracefully handled, making extensive use of advanced queuing technology accessed through the Java Messaging Services interface.
