The now almost age-old question; “but what is SOA then?” has been out for debate at the office where I am right now. It must be stated that this is a gang of developers and quite often the questions bubbles down to; “but this line of code then, is this SOA?”.
I took some time over the weekend and though about it - and came to the conclusion that you cannot answerer that question because the question is not correct in itself. SOA has to do with switching position and behold your world from another angle, was my conclusion.
And lo and behold; today I found an article that explained a lot of stuff surrounding this for me: http://wisdomofganesh.blogspot.com/2008/02/deciding-characteristic-of-soa.html
Great explanation of the differences between SOA and SOAP-RPC.