What is SOA. What are the capabilities and advantages of SOA. What are the components of SOA?

1. What is SOA
SOA is an application architecture that is designed to achieve loose coupling among interacting software application by defining service once and reusing it many times.
In simple words SOA is set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of inter operable services.
Loose coupling: It's a state in which impact of change either change in the provider or consumer is minimized across dependencies.

2. Capabilities and Advantages
Other than just being architecture SOA is set of principles, practices, framework by using which it is ensured that the right services are provided and consumed.
Capabilities of SOA are,

1. Messaging
2. Service discovery
3. Orchestration
4. Web Service monitoring and management
5. Business Rules
6. Event framework
7. Business Activity Monitoring etc.

Advantages of SOA are,

1. Loose Coupling
2. Reusability
3. Flexibility
4. Agility
5. Productivity
6. Faster implementation
7. Reduced cost and maintenance
8. Reliability
9. Scalability

3. Components of SOA

Components of SOA are,

1. Jdeveloper
2. Oracle Service Bus
3. Complex event processing
4. Meta data service repository
5. Enterprise Manager
6. Business activity Monitoring
7. BPEL process manager
8. BPEL
9. Mediator
10. Business Rules
11. Human Workflow
12. Adapters
13. User Messaging Service
14. B2B