Andrej Koelewijn

So SOA is dead, Services are what we need to focus on according to Anne Thomas Manes? How is SOA not about Services? SOA means Service Oriented Architecture. Seems like Anne Thomas Manes is contradicting herself…

SOA is only dead if you interpreted SOA as creating Web Services and building composite applications with BPEL. And yes, that is pretty stupid. And, unfortunately, quite common. I’ve seen simple applications being build with lots of BPEL processes, resulting in very complex, hard to deploy, and hard to manage applications. With bad performance. And, even worse, hard to change. Nothing agile about it.

And yes, people are coming to the conclusion that this is not the way to do SOA. Which is in itself not bad news. It’s just bad news for people who have already standardized on technology which will need to change. They’ll have to rethink their standards.

We still need more innovation to get it right. That’s why i think we’re still in the early adopter phase of SOA.  We need to discover and learn what works and what doesn’t. Which isn’t an easy task as the requirements are moving. First we were doing services inside the enterprise, then we needed to integrate with other companies, and now we need to add cloud services to the mix, and on top of that we would like to do light weight composition in the browser.

I guess that’s the most important lesson here: experiment and learn before you standardize.

Many people like to think that we can design perfect products and frameworks on paper, but the reality is that we need to experiment, learn and iterate. Many newer SOA frameworks are a big improvement over the previous ‘standards’. Just look at a framework like Apache Camel and you know that it can do many things better than BPEL. OSGI is also proving to be useful when working with Services. And i think REST has many advantages over Web Services with SOAP.

BTW, here is a post i wrote a couple of weeks ago where i said that OSGI could be a lot of help to improve innovation in the SOA world: OSGI boost for middleware innovation?