SOA

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) refers to an ambitious, but largely unrealized (as of 2014), vision of automated discovery and late, or dynamic, binding of clients to SOAP-based web services. The concept of software which might pick in real time from a menu of currently available web services arose in conjunction with the XML standard (which was finalized in 1998) and was pursued vigorously in the early years. One major sticking point turned out to be with implementations of centralized directories (databases) in which current implementations of a specific service could be looked up. Additionally, companies bickered over the wire format used to encode messages between clients and service endpoints.