Service Oriented Architecture

A service-oriented architecture is essentially a collection of services. These services communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. Some means of connecting services to each other is needed. The .Net technology introduces the SOA by mean of web services.

“Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a software architecture where functionality is grouped around business processes and packaged as interoperable services.”

"A service-oriented architecture can be defined as a group of services, which communicate with each other. The process of communication involves either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity”

The SOA can be used as the concept to connect multiple systems to provide services. It has it's great share in the future of the IT world.
According to the imaginary diagram above, we can see how the Service Oriented Architecture is being used to provide a set of centralized services to the citizens of a country. The citizens are given a unique identifying card, where that card carries all personal information of each citizen. Each service centers such as shopping complex, hospital, station, and factory are equipped with a computer system where that system is connected to a central server, which is responsible of providing service to a city. As an example when a customer enter the shopping complex the regional computer system report it to the central server and obtain information about the customer before providing access to the premises. The system welcomes the customer. The customer finished the shopping and then by the time he leaves the shopping complex, he will be asked to go through a billing process, where the regional computer system will manage the process. The payment will be automatically handled with the input details obtain from the customer identifying card.
The regional system will report to the city (computer system of the city) while the city will report to the country (computer system of the country).

Service-oriented architectures are not a new thing. The first service-oriented architecture for many people in the past was with the use DCOM or Object Request Brokers (ORBs) based on the CORBA specification