Service Oriented Architecture and Service Orchestration
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a software design principle which allows an application to be exposed as an independent service that can be accessed and reused by one or more applications. Two applications interact through an interface which defines the message exchange pattern and the service contract in order to establish communication successfully between them. It is a great concept that separates implementation logic from the data definitions and allows modularity of programs that can be treated as “silos”--which means they can be developed separately at the same time without any dependencies. More of it on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture . Service orchestration is a concept closely related to SOA which allows services to be arranged and organized into workflows. It enables independent services to interact and talk to each other to achieve an automated end-to-end process. It is often compared to an orchestra in which different musical instrum...