What is service-oriented architecture?

Question

What is service-oriented architecture?

Answer 1

Service Oriented Architecture is a software architectural concept where one or more services interact with each other. Here, service means unit of work to accomplish a purpose. For an example, selling online ticket for railways is a service, online hotel booking is a service, procuring online payment is a service etc. Now, let's consider a hotel company sells its rooms online from its own website. In this case the website is using a local service. The same hotel can also sell rooms through a third party travel portal. In the second case the third party travel portal is using a remote service or web service. Selling hotel bookings online through a travel portal is an example of a Service Oriented Architecture. In service oriented architecture two or more parties interact with each other using web services. Among them few are web service providers and few are web service consumers. A software component can be built by following Service Oriented Architecture by using web services. WCF is a technology to build a service.