Hi,

the post describes SOA and n-tier applications very good in a short way.

KenParkerJr

I understand that SOA can be broken into layers as well

Yes, it could be. Normally a n-tier applications are single applications. SOA (like said above) is an architecture which can contain several applications, for example you have a SOA backend which has several web services. This web services could be consumed by different applications in the appropriate tier (which could have a n-tier architecture).

KenParkerJr

I am looking for both pros and cons of the approach.

This depends on your specific scenario. It's hard to say it in general (because these are different approaches), but you normally use SOA if you're working with several applications which should have access to a common base of data. You could also use SOA if you want to have an extensible backend. In general it would be overhead to use SOA if you only have a single application which is working indepentend.