SOA, or Service Oriented Architecture, is an architectural approach aimed at making it easy to introduce new features into an existing system, share data with other applications for easier integration, and bring a faster Return On Investments (ROI) to the business processes.

An important point to consider is that SOA does not formalize any approach or specific implementation technique. We can implement an SOA-based architecture using a number of different methods and approaches. SOA is an architectural guideline on how to achieve interoperability and cross-process integration in a scalable way. Most developers assume that SOA is equivalent to web services, but the fact is that web services are merely one of the convenient ways to implement an SOA-based architecture, due to the interoperability of XML across varied systems. But this does not imply that we cannot implement SOA without web services! If we don't have to communicate within a heterogeneous environment (having multiple...