Service Oriented Architecture: How would you define it

Question

Service Oriented Architecture seems to be more and more of a hot quote these days, but after asking around the office I have found that I seem to get many different definitions for it. How would you guys define SOA? What would you consider the official definition?

Answer 1

As Martin Fowler says, it means different things to different people. His article on the topic is pretty good although it isn't quite a definition.

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ServiceOrientedAmbiguity.html

It may explain, the difficulty coming up with a concrete definition.

Answer 2

Wikipedia: "A SOA is a software architecture that uses loosely coupled software services to support the requirements of business processes and software users. Resources on a network in an SOA enviroment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation."

SOA is not that new, but it has potential to achieve some amazing things. But the organization has to be ready for it: the business has to think in processes and that's the big problem