On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 1:35 PM, jeffrschneider <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > My concern is that WOA seems to focus on application architecture, > where SOA has the opportunity to bring advances in enterprise > architecture at the portfolio level.
My concern with SOA is that it is SO conceptual that it ends up being only an "aspirational architecture": a set of goals with absolutely no insight/constraints on how to achieve them. See http://ironick.typepad.com/ironick/2007/09/soa-sometimes-i.html . SOA's goals are things like reuse/sharing, agility, loose coupling, robustness, scalability -- but it provides no clue as to how to achieve these timeless goals. And believe me, "make it a service with a service interface" is not NEARLY enough of a clue. My deep satisfaction with WOA is that it provides a wealth of useful constraints at an appropriate level of abstraction that actually help architects/designs build systems that deliver on the aspirations of SOA. Just look at the differences in the discussion threads between this Yahoo group and the REST Yahoo group. The REST group has many extremely pragmatic threads about how to actually design systems that are sharable, agile, loosely coupled, robust, and scalable. I'd rather be part of a useful discussion of actual design advice in the REST group even if it "seems to focus on application architecture", than be part of the useless debates about what is SOA in this group. Don't you find it interesting that the Web is delivering on all the aspirations of SOA without ever needing to use the term? I do. -- Nick
