Heterogeneous System Integration Using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Abstract

The implementation of the service oriented architecture (SOA) and its web service technology that we developed for this research has solving the problem of heterogeneous system integration.

We have taken the academic system in the collage of computer science in Sudan University of Science and Technology as the case study to explain the problem of systems heterogeneous and the need of integration as well as to provide a solution to these problems by using SOA as the road map. We build registration, teacher DB, result web services and academic portal dealing with these web services.

Our achievement in this report is building a portal that uses information from heterogeneous systems in transparent manner and we achieve that by using different development platforms to complete the solution and we know how to develop web services for different databases: Oracle, MS SQL server 2000 and MS Access. Also we found several drawbacks of implementing SOA that faced us during the research starting from its complexity, technical skills, performance, availability and SOA testability.

We also recommend some issues for future work that’s include the maturity of SOA applications in Sudan, reducing the complexity of SOA and SOA testability. Finally we recommend applying SOA in any areas that need integration problems such as Homogeneous applications and E-Governance projects especially for the legacy systems.