While working with ByDesign, you may have heard the acronym “SOA” while referencing the Freedom Software. What does it mean, and what are the benefits to you?
“SOA” means Service-Oriented Architecture. At its core, SOA is just this. It’s a design style that relies on services instead of applications. Software services are a set of functions that can be made available to many different applications and users. Each service is responsible for a specific piece of business logic, and only responsible for that portion. While SOA means many applications, it also means only one instance of its services.
As a result, we built the software using many well-defined software services that are only loosely-coupled to one another or to the application that you are using. From a larger perspective, this means that the software has more emphasis on simplicity and precise requirements and business rules. There is also a level of abstraction between the user experience and the services that the application is built upon so that any service we change will have little or no impact on another. Many of these services are exposed directly as APIs that our Enterprise clients can use as well as our applications.
We’ve used the SOA platform while creating the new shopping cart, new Freedom BackOffice, and a new Restful API backend. The new shopping cart calls our SOA APIs directly. The new BackOffice has the services running locally, and they are used for many parts of the system already.
This new architecture and new applications allow us to write software that is more aligned to the needs of your business without being constrained by the implementation details of any one module.
For example, there are many places in the Freedom system where we may need to know information about a given rep. By having one service specifically for handling rep information, both ByDesign and our Enterprise clients (via the API) can build software around that one service.
These are just the highlights of the benefits this new system provides. Furthermore, ByDesign will continue to add functionality to these areas and work towards making it easier for you to run your business without having to worry about friction between your goals and your software platform.