The document provides information about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). It discusses the characteristics, principles, evolution and comparison of SOA with past architectures like client-server and distributed architectures. Some key points include:
- SOA decomposes automation logic into smaller distinct units called services.
- It evolved from XML, then web services, and is now modeled with three components - service requestor, provider and registry.
- Services encapsulate logic and relate/communicate through service descriptions and messages.
- Common characteristics of SOA include being autonomous, using open standards, supporting vendor diversity, discovery, interoperability and loose coupling.
- SOA is compared to past application and enterprise architectures and