Which one of the following statements is true about the Service-Oriented…
2023
Which one of the following statements is true about the Service-Oriented Architecture?
- A.
It is possible to exchange data between applications from different vendors without using additional programming.
- B.
It provides computational resources on-demand as a metered service.
- C.
Service-Oriented Architecture allows using the application as a service for other applications.
- D.
Both hold true together: SOA lets applications from different vendors exchange data without any extra programming, and it also lets one application be consumed as a service by other applications.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: D
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural style in which application functionality is exposed as discrete, reusable services that communicate over a network through standardized protocols and interfaces (such as SOAP or WSDL), independent of the vendor, product, or technology used to build each service.
Because SOA publishes each service behind a standardized, technology-neutral interface (its published contract) rather than a vendor-specific one, this design has two direct consequences:
Applications built by different vendors can exchange data with each other without writing custom, vendor-specific integration code, because every consumer only needs to conform to the service's published standard contract (for example, a WSDL description) rather than to each vendor's proprietary API.
Any application can itself be published and consumed as a service by other applications, since the core unit of SOA is a self-contained, reusable service rather than a monolithic, vendor-locked program.
In contrast, providing computational resources on demand as a metered service is the defining trait of Cloud Computing (utility/IaaS-style provisioning) — it describes elastic resource billing, not service interoperability, so it is not a property of SOA.
Since both the vendor-independent data-exchange capability and the application-as-a-service capability are genuine, well-established properties of SOA, the statement that combines them is the complete and correct description.