Are SOA and web-services synonymous?

Amir Shevat has an very interesting article titled 'Are SOA and web-services synonymous?'. Here is an extract from his article....


"SOA is an architectural paradigm whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software applications. Applications invoke a series of discrete services in order to perform a certain task. A service is a unit of work done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a service consumer.

Web services provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications. When an application calls web-services it actually invokes remote methods on other applications with the use of XML as a communication protocol (usually over an HTTP transport protocol) ."

I very much agree with what he says in the end "The bottom line is that we need to choose the right technology to fit the right task and not to go blindly with the crowds. I guess that this is a good advice for life in general…", its so very true.