John Wood

This "SOA hype is getting out of hand" hype is getting out of hand

It amazes me that some people still don't get what SOA is all about. In the spirit of Sahil's post let's call this "IDontGedditSoLetsBlameMarketing-itis".

http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/2005/01/06/347558.aspx

Or maybe it's "SmallPicturitis".

I quote: "I mean: every developer on the planet knows that if you have several different elements in your application... element E provides services for element F and F is consumer of the services of element E."

A true service is a re-usable, loosely coupled, stateless, self-describing, platform independent, highly accessible asset of your business. Sure any old function provides a service. But how dependent is that service on the rest of your application? How dependent is that service on the state of its declaring type? How accessible is that service to other applications? And therefore, how truly re-usable *is* that function?

The SOA wave is all about opening doors to applications and liberating the services they provide so that they're accessible to everyone. Service architecture brings forth many other benefits too, including scalability, high availability and distributed collaboration that just isn't so easy with a tightly-coupled system.

And if it really is hype, then the SOAP spec is one hell of a bad brochure.

PEACE!