Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a hot topic among analysts, CIOs, and technology marketers, but the path from high-level architectural principles to programming a functioning, real-world service isn't always clear, especially since, in the end, you still need to create a clean user interface that's as flexible as the services it consumes.
Why SOA?
The concepts underlying SOA aren't a major divergence from standard design principles like abstraction, encapsulation, and reuse. To put it simply, SOA is a software architecture in which application functionality is encapsulated as independent services. These services are in many cases Web Services but can also be services derived from various technology types. Clients in different applications or business processes can then consume these services. More important, an SOA is designed to decouple the implementation of a software service from the interfaces that call that service. This lets clients of a service rely on a consistent interface regardless of the implementation technology of the service.
