The term Service in reference to software applications and internet generally denotes an independent function which is autonomous, self reliant and well defined in nature. Now, a collection of such services can be described as a Service Oriented Architecture or simply as SOA. SOA is essentially a style for generating and utilizing business processes, which are put together as services. These are basically loosely coupled with the OS and the application or function’s programming language. Though quite popular among both vendors and users, SOA cannot be considered a pioneering feat as it was preceded by DCOM or Object Request Brokers which had their roots in the CORBA specifications.
The use of SOA is dictated by different standardized codes and principles; primary among them being fulfillment of both common as well as industry specific standards. Next come Reuse, granularity, modularity, compos ability, componentization, and interoperability which are followed by identifying and classifying and categorizing services along with provisioning, delivery, supervising and tracking. An SOA is generally created using WS standards such as SOAP (which once stood for Simple Object Access Protocol). These WS specifications also provide a good platform for encouraging interactive operations as well as interoperability. However, SOA has also been criticized because of the claims that it leads to additional XML layers resulting in XML parsing and structure.