What is SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)?

Question

Call me a troll if you want, but I\'m serious: how exactly is the new SOA trend any different than the client-service architecture that I was building 15 years ago?

Answer 1

SOA is nothing but a way of design, in which the modules comunicates with each others through "services". It is just that, and now the next question is: what is exactly a "service" and what is its difference with a regular "method"??

A service is an operation that performs a single, atomic business operation. This atomicity make it highly reusable from many modules. Then a complex business operation is just the orchestation of the invokation of many of these services in a specific order.

SOA has nothing to do with specific technology, is just an specific way of designing.