Service Oriented Architecture

Hello, I need a brief overview of what a service oriented architechture actually is.

My understanding is that, rather than objects themselves performing methods and being crucial to the application, it is the methods of the application that do the work - i.e you pass your objects from one method to another. So you might have a method called UpdateUser which accepts a user object as a parameter.

Is this wrong/right?

Any ideas please?

 

Thanks
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