I went to a panel debate on SOA yesterday arranged by the Norwegian JUG in Oslo. It had a nice composition of 7 people and with a lot of interaction from the public they kept going for almost three hours.
Of course no one could really agree on what SOA was, but I think one of the most important things that came out of it is that SOA is often marketed as something that delivers what it still can’t. The promise of a flexible and reconfigurable system is certainly attractive, but it can’t deliver that today. What it can deliver is a way to integrate and orchestrate several services into new business processes. This is not something you let the business users change with point and click later on though.
It was also mentioned that SOA isn’t CRUD operations exposed as webservices. You might need to do it because of varying client technologies that require these operations, but I don’t think it’s something you could call SOA. Services are at a higher level, and I believe it is something you mainly construct at the edges of your system, not in the middle and for internal use.
An excellent event that should be repeated. Something as controversial as SOA rarely surface, so it might be a long time till next time. 😉