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Getting Started with SOA and WSO2

We will try to introduce this book with a simple, brief, and concise discussion of SOA, talking about its origin and what it means. We will discuss the facts or problems that large companies with a huge IT system had to face, and that finally gave rise to the SOA approach.

Once we know what we are talking about, we will introduce the WSO2 technology and describe the role it plays in SOA, which will be followed by the installation and configuration of the WSO2 products we will use.

So, in this chapter, we will deal with the following topics:

A basic knowledge of SOA
Download WSO2 Enterprise Integrator
WSO2 Update Manager (WUM)
Update with the official Patches
Set up WSO2 Enterprise Integrator
Start Enterprise Integrator

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a style, an approach to design software in a different way from the standard. SOA is not a technology; it is a paradigm, a design style.

There comes a time when a company grows and grows, which means that its IT system also becomes bigger and bigger, fetching a huge amount of data that it has to share with other companies. This typical data may be, for example, any of the following:

Sales data
Employees data
Customer data
Business information

In this environment, each information need of the company's applications is satisfied by a direct link to the system that owns the required information. So, when a company becomes a large corporation, with many departments and complex business logic, the IT system becomes a spaghetti dish:

The SOA approach versus CORBA and DCOM

Finally, with the SOA approach, by the end of the '90s, independent applications where able to share their data while avoiding dependencies. This data interchange is done using services. An SOA service is a data interchange need between different systems that accomplishes some rules. These rules are the so-called SOA principles that we will explain as we move on.