Originally inspired by techniques used to design buildings and cities, and popularized by the Gang of Four during the mainstream emergence of object-orientation, design patterns have seen us through the various shifts in architecture, technology, and, of course, design. Pattern catalogs have periodically emerged, one building on the other, and each revealing a set of problem-solving techniques and providing invaluable insights as to how and when those techniques should be used to help us attain our design goals.

SOA has its own history, having risen out of a haze of ambiguity to establish itself as the basis of a distinct and maturing distributed computing platform with a distinct and ambitious design paradigm in its own right.