Can I Be of Service?

Description:When I started to think about writing this month's column I looked on the Internet for a good way to define service-oriented architecture (SOA). Some of the definitions were interesting, like "A Service Oriented Architecture is basically a Collection of Services" (www.service-architecture.com/). Others were a little bit more technical, such as "SOA is an architectural style whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents" (www.xml.com).