SOA or Service-Oriented Architecture is a software architecture pattern in which applications or systems are constructed from underlying (and usually distributed) software services that conform to a specific set of characteristics, namely:
- Interface, Policy and Contract based
- Location transparency
- Autonomous
- Abstract
- Reusable
- Composable
- Stateless
- Discoverable
- Extensible
- Loosely coupled
The primary goal of SOA is sofware development agility, i.e. the ability to respond the change easily, and cheaply, thus allowing businesses to rapidly respond to changing markets.
Services are typically (but by no means exclusively) implemented as web services, i.e. they operate over the ubiquitous web HTTP protocol, and are implemented either using XML-based SOAP or the lightweight (and more popular) REST paradigm.
