2 Network and distributed architectures

As our description has moved from monolithic applications to client–server and then to N-tier, the application has been broken down into more and more parts. This trend has been extended in a modern approach called service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA is based around the idea of breaking down an application into a set of much smaller tasks that can be performed by small independent, ‘software components’, each performing a discrete task commonly called a service. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) will be explained in the next section.