SOA

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) refers to a grand, but largely unrealized (as of 2011), vision of automated discovery and late binding for 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. The sticking point turned out to the with implementations of centralized directories (databases) in which current implementations of a specific service could be looked up.