Is SOA Dead as a Term but Alive as a Concept?

There are a bunch of companies still using WS technologies. I remember when tech news mentioned SOA a lot. At that time, SOA was presented as a principle and WS as the recommended technology, I don't see that "shift" because SOA was never a technology, IMHO. I do not think WS is that complicate but I do think it has performance issues. I think SOA and WS has taken its place in the computing, that is all.

I agree, the principles behind SOA aren't dead (especially since those principles are deeply rooted in quality software design). If anything, "the cloud" makes SOA more important, not less. I'm also glad to see the SOAP/WS* stack start to decline. I think there has been too much emphasis on the use of SOAP for everything; REST and messaging have proven to be better in certain situations.

Is SOA = “SOA is a conceptual business architecture where business functionality, or application logic, is made available to SOA users, or consumers, as shared, reusable services on an IT network. “Services” in an SOA are modules of business or application functionality with exposed interfaces, and are invoked by messages. ”

OR

Is SOA = “SOA is an architectural style whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents. A service is a unit of work done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a service consumer.”

First version is dead, second version has gone mainstream!

setandbma.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/soa-trends-m...

Is SOA = “SOA is a conceptual business architecture where business functionality, or application logic, is made available to SOA users, or consumers, as shared, reusable services on an IT network. “Services” in an SOA are modules of business or application functionality with exposed interfaces, and are invoked by messages. ”

OR

Is SOA = “SOA is an architectural style whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents. A service is a unit of work done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a service consumer.”

First version is dead, second version has gone mainstream!

setandbma.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/soa-trends-m...

Well, SOAP is messaging...

Fair enough; I was attempting to differentiate between SOAP WebServices and "more traditional" messaging technologies like JMS, AMQP, and the vendor specific products (TIBCO, MSMQ, etc.).

IMHO, SOA isn't a technology stack, nor it suggests use of any specific technology. SOA is an abstract technology-independent concept, with principles that guide you to more economic software development. I don't understand how things like: reusability, contract, loose coupling, abstraction, composition, statelessness, discoverability; which constitute SOA, can be dead?! So called "SOA technology stacks" are big vendor's marketing deceptions.

I understand that David Rubinstein wanted to provoke a discussion about SOA in Technology and SOA in Architecture but a term cannot e dead if we use it. SOA was coined as Architecture but concurred by Technology; it is not a surprise that Technology had broken its neck in this adventure. Technical “SOA” was announced dead by Anne Thomas Manes in 2009, without assistance from Paul Fremantle and Jason Bloomberg. I do not know when Jason started to consider SOA a bad term but that time his course on SOA had very little in common with Technology.

Actually, I have to add that SOA as architectural realisation of Principle of Service Orientation has shifted, indeed, but not into Architecture (where it was all the time but IT did not want to admit it); it has shifted into Business according to the OASIS SOA Reference Architecture Foundation specification. The absurd is in that people still say “SOA” meaning technology (e.g., Web Services) and use such expression as “SOA vendors” while all agree that architecture, concept or paradigm is not a “thing” which can be bought from a vendor.

Service Orientation is, first of all, a way of thinking, a mentality if you want. I do not know how many years have to pass when people would adopt a simple idea that architecture is independent from the forms of its implementation. The only way an implementation can affect the architecture is via service execution context – a set of policies that regulate particular implementation. In this light, saying that a technology that cannot reflect arbitrary sets of policies is a SOA Technology would be incorrect. In particular, execution context address policies of communication with a service and the policies under which the service executes or is compliant with. In this case, how “SOA technologies such as REST, are considered fundamental”? How REST can reflect any policies beside the Web realm? How a means of communication with a resource may become a service on its own without the service body that, actually, does the job – provides consumers with the results of capability execution?

My take on this subject is very simple: a) forget about technology as a driver; b) engage with service-oriented ecosystem; c) consider that this ecosystem has architecture among others and this architecture is called service-oriented architecture, d) recognise that the driver of the service-oriented ecosystem is business that may or may not need technology for its execution and wellbeing.