Sure, you’ve had SOA (service-oriented architecture) explained to you a hundred times. And you always think you understand it . . . for about five minutes. Then it starts to get fuzzy again. (At least, this is how I felt for a long time.)

If you’re in the same boat, read yesterday’s entry on Peeyush Tugnawat’s blog. Tugnawat is a principal consultant with Oracle specializing in SOA and enterprise integration technologies. In this post he provides some “common sense” answers to the most frequently asked questions he encounters about SOA. These questions include:

• I have heard about it so much, but what exactly is SOA?
• What is a service?
• What is different about the service-oriented approach for enterprise integration?

Tugnawat explains the concept of “service” in a non-technical way. He writes:

Service means the performance of any duties or work for another. Service is provided by a service provider and consumed by the service consumer. Simple!

Think about it. We all use and provide services almost everyday in our day-to-day life. Following are some examples of well-known services:

Service Provider: Government
Services Provided: Education Services, Infrastructure Services, Police and Fire Services, Postal Services, and other regulatory services

He goes on to use the example of flight service to illustrate the terms service extraction, loose coupling and service orchestration. Click here to read the rest of his explanation.

-Elisa