SOA Raises the Bar on Elegant Systems

Scott Robinson, writing in TechRepublic, seemed to be writing an epitaph for service oriented architecture.  At least, his article started out that way.

Then he realizes that SOA, has, indeed, has had a positive impact it had on the way we handle and employ business technology.  Here are the ways:

A higher class of coder: “SOA requires an economy and robustness that few other design paradigms call for.”

No more monolithic assemblies: SOA takes away the pain of maintaining and testing lines and lines of code.

XML is now the courier of choice: SOA helped elevate XML into the enterprise.

Developers write reusable code by default: “I remember a time, not so long ago, when developers changed code and crossed their fingers. That doesn’t happen nearly as often in an SOA shop.”

I would like to add a fifth point to Scott’s analysis: SOA introduced the notion that essential pieces of applications can be elevated and abstracted as consistent, abstracted and well-governed services for delivery to anyone that needs them. We see this echoed in today’s generation of app stores.

Don’t be too fast to write off SOA as a flash-in-the-pan initiative that came and went with the last decade. The important work that is happening today — cloud, mobile, Big Data analytics, social — all rely on a service-oriented foundation to function. Remember, SOA is a philosophy, not a specific technology. It’s more than a legacy; it’s how we do business.