Cutting through the hype of SOA

Grady Booch seems to be back into his stride after his recent illness. In his most recent blog post (Thursday, October 12, 2006) he criticises the unscrupulous advocacy of SOA as though it were a silver bullet. He also points out that any successes of SOA were more than likely due to the application of Architecture, rather than Service Orientation. He points out that SOA is a platform specific kind of message passing architecture that capitalises on the benefits of web technologies to simplify message passing on the internet. He also points out that a considerable amount of design must go into producing a good design for an SOA architecture.

So what did I take away from this? That there is still no substitute for good design, and any project team that thinks it can automatically get a good system by using an acronym rather than devote time to design is heading for embarrassment…