Builder.com has published an article by Jeff Hanson that claims that building and deploying applications using a service-oriented architecture enables loose coupling between components, the benefits of which include location transparency, protocol independence, and time independence.
Jini is a Java implementation of an SOA. Jini provides a platform to build applications using a federation of services that provide the desired functionality. Clients use the Jini platform to find a service via a lookup service, which allows the two components (the service and the code calling the service) to be location transparent. The Jini platform handles where the services are located, so that neither the service nor the code calling the service needs to know where they are.
Another example of how SOA provides loosely coupled benefits is with Web services. Web services represent an increasingly popular SOA methodology for deploying services, enabling location transparency by utilizing registries such as UDDI for runtime discovery. Clients can locate the desired service dynamically by requesting the service from the registry. The Web services architecture provides benefits of loose coupling by providing a mechanism to locate, bind, and call the service dynamically.
Web services allow service developers to implement services using any programming language such as Java or .NET. Web services clients communicate to the service using SOAP, which is XML over HTTP. In addition, Web services developers need not worry about wire-protocol issues since the SOA platforms handle these issues for them.
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