Can someone explain in plain english what is SOA all about? I hear SOA here, SOA there but I cannot understand exacly what it is and what is used for. Was it some simple concept and later evolved into something huge or what?
All documents, including wiki are a bit abstract or maybe I’m an idiot and don’t get it. Is there an idiot’s guide on this?
What exactly is there behind these three letters?
You might find this article (What is SOA? – SOA and Web Services Explained ) helpful.
A little teaser:
SOA is a style of architecting applications in such a way that they are composed of discrete software agents that have simple, well defined interfaces and are orchestrated through a loose coupling to perform a required function.
There are 2 roles in SOA- a service provider and a service consumer. A software agent may play both roles. SOA is not an entirely new concept – however, this article mainly focuses on SOA as implemented with web services.