SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) is an architectural style that evolved from distributed computing. It relies on service-orientation as its fundamental design principle by providing a collection of services that communicate with each other.
SOA provides modularization of business logic, which can then be presented as services to clients. Business logic is made available as independent services, and can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation.
Note that SOA is significantly different from object oriented programming. SOA provides a loose coupling among interacting software agents, while object orientations attempts to bind data and its processing together.
 Also see
- SOA Suite - Oracle's SOA implementation
- Web Services Manager - scaled down offering and a component of Oracle's SOA Suite
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