Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is not just an architecture of services seen from a technological perspective, but the policies, practices and frameworks by which we ensure that the right services are provided and consumed. This paper is the outcome of the efforts to study SOA, its efficiency and drawbacks. Some methods to tackle the problems faced by SOA are also briefed.

Developing software for networked systems has always been a challenging task and the current trend of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is obviously fascinating and exigent. SOA allows users to distribute applications to multiple locations across the Internet and allows the reuse of code, which made it widely accepted.

An SOA application should handle and process as much load as is dumped on it without compromise on the efficiency of the performance, which is a tedious task. It is usually deployed in a server farm in a load balanced environment. An SOA application should assure to handle and process as many load as that is dumped on it which is a tedious task and at the same time no compromise on the efficiency of the performance. It is usually deployed in a server farm in a load balanced environment and it has to take extensive measures to enhance the performance and scalability of the application even though it is designed to provide these. The way of coding the application, storing it and accessing it, all matters to have a good SOA1 (David Chou et al., 2010).

A true SOA application should scale easily as far as the application architecture is concerned. It has two components: service components and client applications. The client application may be a web application, another service or any other application that relies on the SOA service component. The application is broken up into smaller chunks and these components run on separate servers as independent components.

Designing the interface to invoke specific methods, designing the services offered by the SOA, choosing the right communication protocol, etc., should be done with utmost perfection. For users and services to communicate with each other while using web services, a service contract describing the services is usually written using web service description language in which all services offered are listed. From the list, the users can select their preference, which is implemented using universal description discovery and integration. Protocols like simple object access protocol or representation state transfer protocol are used to enable smooth communication, which helps the SOA to be capable of organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under different ownership domains (Natis, 2007 and Schlimmer and Young, 2000).

Computer Sciences Journal, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Systems, Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, CRM, Business Operations Management, Business Process Mining, Finite State Machine, Transactional Information System, Genetic Algorithms, Decision Making Process, Data Mining Tools, Online Analysis Processing, OLAP, Artificial Intelligence.