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

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a design approach where multiple services collaborate to provide some end set of capabilities. A service here typically means a completely separate operating system process. Communication between these services occurs via calls across a network rather than method calls within a process boundary. SOA emerged as an approach to combat the challenges of the large monolithic applications. It is an approach that aims to promote the reusability of software; two or more end-user applications, for example, could both use the same services. It aims to make it easier to maintain or rewrite software, as theoretically we can replace one service with another without anyone knowing, as long as the semantics of the service don’t change too much.