SOA and EDA: A comparative study: Similarities, differences and conceptual guidelines on their usage

Changing business requirements and new technologies trigger the business stakeholders to shift their approach from many small isolated systems to a single connected system. Integration of isolated systems is partially supported by service oriented architecture (SOA) and event driven architecture (EDA), each of which provides a set of system design guidelines. Since the purpose of both architectures is similar, the stakeholders have to make a choice on which architecture to use. The objective of this paper is to investigate the differences between SOA and EDA and provide conceptual guidelines on which architecture to consider for a given set of requirements. Apart from literature, we have considered various online resources (blogs, forums) that argue about differences and similarities between SOA and EDA. To clarify the design principles of both architectures, we present a case study of a learning management system (LMS).