A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that supports service orientation. Service here is a discrete unit of functionality that can be accessed remotely, acted upon, and updated independently, such as retrieving a credit card statement online. As shown in the below example, SOA is also intended to be independent of vendors, products, and technologies. These interfaces utilize common communication standards in such a way that they can rapidly be incorporated into new applications without having to perform deep integration each time. It should be noted here that the format if the representation is specified in the hypertext protocol header and header accepts fields specify the format of the input and output.
