On Oct 3, 2007, at 4:44 PM, Nick Gall wrote:
No, my complaint is that if all SOA is good for is to remind us that IT people should be thinking about business problems before getting wrapped up in technologies, then we should chuck the term "SOA" because we don't need it. We've been making the same point with the same degree of success or lack thereof using lots of other terms (how about simply "business-driven"?) since the dawn of business computing.
I may be in the minority position here, but I actually do like the high-level SOA concept *and* I'm convinced that REST is vastly superior to the technical SOA idea. The reason is that the high-level SOA idea, as I see it, introduces well-known concepts such as modularity, interface/implementation separation, standards and uniformity to a layer they've not applied to before -- specifically, the enterprise architecture level.
Even if it may be for the wrong reasons -- such as undeserved hype and lots of exaggerated promises -- it's great that you can now talk to a CxO about the value of having a common set of interface standards so that any application can access functions provided by others without having to start an integration project. And if considering REST as an implementation option for SOA is what it takes to make companies adopt it, that's perfectly fine with me.
Stefan -- Stefan Tilkov, http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/
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