Understanding Service-Oriented Architecture

SOA and web services are the buzzwords that promise to solve all integration issues in the enterprise space. Although any kind of implementationcan be an SOA implementation, unfortunately many implementations using web services are marketed as SOA implementations, when in reality they are not.

SOA can be simply defined as an architectural concept or style that uses a set of "services" to achieve the desired functionality. A service is an autonomous (business) system that accepts one or more requests and returns one or more responses via a set of published and well-defined interfaces. Unlike traditional tightly coupled architectures, SOA implements a set of loosely coupled services that collectivelyachieve the desired results.