You might have been asking yourself for a while now what this Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) thing is and why it should matter to you. If you're a developer you've probably been wondering what you'll need to learn to avoid being left behind. You'd probably also like to know what steps you can take to position your development team and your organization for the future. If you're like me when I first started hearing about SOA, you've done some Web searches and read a few articles, but haven't fully grasped:

• the difference between SOA and Web Services;
• what's required to actually implement an SOA;
• how Indigo fits into the picture;
• and whether SOA is an all or nothing proposition;
• what your role is in developing an application.

These are just a few of the questions that typically come up and this article will guide you through the answers.