Table 2.

Table 2 Key SOA Properties

SOA Property	Details
Business-oriented services	Core IT capabilities are encapsulated within services whose scope and functionality are meaningful from a business perspective Services are typically relatively broad in scope, providing relatively few operations in conjunction with relatively large, complex service inputs and/or outputs
Message-based interactions with “black-box” implementations	Each service is defined in terms of the messages it exchanges with its clients Service implementation details, such as the programming language used and the structure of any underlying databases, are deliberately abstracted away
Communication over a network	Although not required, SOA messages are typically exchanged across a network, such as an intranet or the Internet
Platform neutrality	Messages are communicated using platform-neutral, standardized formats such as extensible markup language (XML) messages
Service description and discovery	Service interfaces are described using a platform-neutral description language Services are associated with a mechanism for discovering their existence
Loose coupling	Services are designed to be as independent as possible from other services as well as from front-end applications that invoke the service