The SOA Hype

Original post: 10/12/2006

There has been a lot of hype about SOA recently and as much as I’d like to jump on board I haven’t seen the need.The Gartner conference was no different, go figure they were talking about how SOA is the future. I was a bit turned off at first, but when I got past hearing “SOA” the message was quite different. I left feeling encouraged about the Service Oriented Enterprise. Why? It wasn’t about the technology but rather the root concept that I think was lost in the hype. Two words… Service Oriented.
Sure this sounds obvious enough but I bet most people are still thinking ESBs, WSDL and the like. Looking at Application Development from a service perspective isn’t that new we’ve been doing it for years but on a smaller scale. Developers routinely create helper object to do routine things, format text, perform math calculations whatever, you might call those service objects.

The difficult part is thinking beyond your immediate need by planning for a larger audience. Reuse, the holy grail of IT (everything actually, my wife routinely wants to reuse my old t-shirts as dust rags). Sorry I digress. SOA is about providing reusable systems (large or small) that may potentially be used by other processes down the road.

One caveat. PLAN. With no road map, tracking or governance around your services, you’ll end up with a huge mess of improperly used services.