SOA in WCF

SOA stands for service oriented architecture. Service Oriented Architecture is an architectural approach in software development where the application is organized as "Services". Services are a group of methods that contain the business logic to connect a DB or other services. For instance you go to a hotel and order food. Your order first goes to the counter and then it goes to the kitchen where the food is prepared and finally the waiter serves the food.

SOA is nothing but an architectural style where two non-compatible applications cancommunicate using a common language and WCF is nothing but one example of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).Characteristics of SOA:

• In SOA, Services should be independent of other services. Altering a service should not affect calling service.
• Services should be able to define themselves. Services should be able to answer a question what is does? It should be able to tell client what all operations it does, what all data types it uses and what kind of responses it will return.
• Services should support reliable messaging. Means there should be a guarantee that request will be reached to correct destination and correct response will be obtained.
• Services should support secure communication.

SOA is thinking, it's an architectural concept and web service is one of the technical approach to complete it. Web services are the preferred standards to achieve SOA.

• In SOA we need the services to be loosely coupled. A web service communicates using SOAP protocol which is XML based which is very loosely coupled. SOA services should be able to describe themselves. WSDL describes how we can access the service.