The Top 10 SOA Myths Revisited

Services were invented in the IT department and are spreading out to the business: This assumes that SOA architects and designers are reinventing the business through introduction of new SOA solutions. According to Yefim, SOA is not about restructuring the business, but rather about improving the ability of software designers and software architects to model the real world better. Software is not bringing the solution to the business, its better understanding the business.

Sharing or reusing application logic is the main benefit of SOA. Despite the fact that many SOA proponents are trying to sell SOA as a reuse Holy Grail, Yefim looks at this differently: reuse is not the primary benefit, although it is one of the benefits of service oriented architecture. There are many other things, such a making your internal architecture more manageable, having greater extensibility, and applications that function a lot better when they are service oriented.

# SOA introduces new complications and new problems. Yefim notes that: most issues that have to do with deploying and establishing service-oriented systems are not issues of SOA; they’re issues of distributed computing, or of modern grid based computing networks..

# SOA is nothing new, it’s hype, its taking old wine and trying to sell it in a new bottle. According to Yefim, when thinking about SOA one should think beyond technology (for example RPC) ::SOA is intended to address a business topology of the business functionality of the application, whereas RPCs were intended to simply distribute an application.

# SOA is doomed because Web services don’t work well enough. In Yefim’s opinion, the view that SOA is entirely based on SOAP is one of the biggest SOA misconceptions:There’s nothing in common between the two, yet people confuse SOA with SOAP. SOA is not about Web services - Web services is one of the ways of establishing connectivity between the clients and the services of SOA.

# SOA is hard to sell because the business can’t see the benefits. It depends on the level of SOA, explains Yefim. As more companies move into advanced SOA, business benefits will become more apparent:Event-driven SOA has very important components to it that allow direct benefits, clear benefits to business operations, to any business that wants to gain control over its overall IT information environment or wants to build situation awareness.

# SOA is obsolete, and it’s time to move on. According to Yefim, SOA is losing its attractiveness to analysts" There’s no intrigue anymore in basic SOA. We know how to do it, it’s not talked about as much as before [but] what are you going to move on to? The only alternatives you’re going to find to SOA are going to be advanced forms of SOA.

1. Please tell me how (concretely) does SOA make architecture more manageable, and extensible without reuse? and... how does it make applications work better ?

SOA is an architectural style that enables one to better align the functional architecture of their software to the real business. Just like OOPS languages allow you to design systems modeled on real world entities (classes, objects), SOA allows you to model your system using business entities (Post Cash Deposit Service, Cancel Shipping Order Service). Re-usability is the real Marketecture since you may be convincing business to adopt SOA with no clear definition of its short term benefits. How much more reusable have the components in your application become since you adopted SOA as compared to your OOPS application written in Java or C#?

2. SOA is doomed because Web services don’t work well enough.. And the ways others are?

You have to pass messages to services (loose coupling), but SOA does not rule how. You can use JMS, TCP/HTTP (the enterprise application I work on uses these), even objects passed over RPC.

IMHO,
1. "SOA is not about restructuring the business, but rather about improving" business understanding about its own organisation and its own ability to adopt changes in the most effective way

2. "... service oriented systems... include clients, batch components which are not service oriented, and include legacy systems that need to be connected to". It is unclear what would mean 'service oriented systems... include clients'. Also, there is a notion of service resources and the legacy systems play the role of resources very well. I do not see any problems in batch components being a part of a service (certainly, without a Web Service interface)

3. I agree with Yefim but would articulated whet the main benefit of SOA is [M.P. - business flexibility]

4. I agree with Yefim

5. I would said that proper usage of SOA in Business were led to the reduced cost of IT

And again,
1. I think that "most issues that have to do with deploying and establishing service-oriented systems are" in operational Business misunderstanding of what IT is doing

2. SOA is nothing new indeed, at the top of the business hierarchy business was and is service oriented from the beginning. IT tries to automate some of business operations and, actually, re-invent services into the business operational environment. I think that if this process would go top-down, there were much less 'blood' and emotions.

3. I am glad that Yefim has said this simple thing about SOa and Web Services

4. SOA should be sold to business via business values instead of IT automation capabilities

5. I still think majority of IT still does not know how to 'do SOA'. I would recommend to look at the OASIS Reference Architecture Foundation for SOA - the second public review draft (see it at the Home page of OASIS).
I'm very much with Yefim on "The only alternatives you’re going to find to SOA are going to be advanced forms of SOA", and you will find it in Business rather than in IT.