Service-Oriented Architecture
Monday, March 08, 2010
10:47 AM
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Refers to the practice of breaking up an application into components that are implemented as independent services. 
Kinds of services include:
Datastore services: store and retrieve kinds of data/objects. 
Filestore services: store and retrieve files.
Lookup services: (quickly) query into (potentially huge) databases/corpora.
Compute services: perform some compute-intensive operation, e.g., analyze an image, convert voice to text, mine corpora for patterns, look for evidence of extraterrestrial life, etc. 