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What exactly is service-oriented architecture? QUESTION POSED ON: 20 OCT 2004
QUESTION ANSWERED BY: Ron Schmelzer, Jason Bloomberg Here's some takes on this for you, depending on the verbosity you are looking for:
  • Very short:
    "Service-oriented architecture (SOA) represents an approach to designing distributed computing infrastructures that considers software resources as services available and discoverable on a network."

  • A bit longer, more descriptive:
    "Service-oriented architecture is an architectural discipline that centers on the notion that IT assets are described and exposed as services. These services can then be composed in a loosely coupled fashion into higher-level business processes, which provide business agility in the face of IT heterogeneity."

  • To avoid circular reference:
    A service is a unit of IT functionality that has a defined interface, or contract, by which consumers can discover the capabilities of and means to access the functionality. Services may in turn be composed of other services. A service can be defined in an abstract means without being specifically bound to any particular implementation or protocol, which differs it from previous component or object approaches.

  • To define loose coupling:
    Loose coupling is the ability for a consumer of a service to be independently defined, modified and controlled from the producer of that service without requiring any change of the producer -- and vice-versa. Only the service interface or contract defines the relationship between consumers and producers and not any aspect of implementation.
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