SOA: What's all the “noise” about?

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Recently there have been lots of buzz around Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Along with this it has brought many other acronyms such as ESB, ESA etc. Let us understand what is SOA?

SOA allows organizations to expand its existing business applications and integrate them with other applications without disturbing them too much. SOA takes a business process centric approach and allows to implement the system in form of loosely coupled components, each called as services.

There are few myths around SOA:

  • SOA is not just web services. Web services is one way of implementing SOA.
  • SOA is not just about service delivery alone i.e. its not just about making applications talk to each other.
  • SOA is not ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) or ESA. While ESB could be considered as a part of SOA, ESA is SAP's SOA initiative using SAP NetWeaver Platform.