What Developments in SOA Are You Most Thankful For This Year?

The proclamation that "SOA is dead" by Anne Thomas Manes, a Research Director with the Burton Group, in her blog entry "SOA is Dead; Long Live Services", which has actually resulted in a revived interest and focus on SOA by sparking much needed debates, soul-searching, and introspection.

Two things:

1) The ATM wake-up call: I couldn't agree more with Tarak. If it weren't for Anne Thomas Manes shaking the industry out of its sleep, SOA would have crawled along, with more and more people growing frustrated with the methodology. Anne threw cold water on thinking that was growing calcified, and re-energized the way we look at service orientation.

2) The SOA Manifesto: I'm biased, since I helped craft the document, but I saw a lot of smart people finally come together in October (including Anne Thomas Manes!) to spell out what it really means to be service oriented. Just as the Agile Manifesto really helped define Agile, the SOA Manifesto may help to clear up some of the confusion that's held back the potential of the SOA philosophy.

In 2009, it finally felt like the (over) hype cycle for SOA was well in the past, and people were just getting down to doing it. They found that SOA was a lot of work, it took a long time, and that SOA offers no magic bullets that will solve all of their problems. But they recognized SOA's value and will continue in this direction. SOA is real in 2009, and for that, I am thankful.

I can count 3 events:

1) Anne’s "SOA is Dead; Long Live Services"
2) SOA Manifesto that explained Service Orientation instead of service technology
3) OASIS Reference Architecture Foundation for SOA that finally has positioned SOA between Business and Technology and opened the doors for Business SOA or SOBA.

I agree SOA is dead" by Anne Thomas Manes, even though SOA is alive and kicking. This blog post is important because it brought forward the mistakes in many SOA implementations and the misuse of the three letters S O A.

I believe the large scale acknowledgement of the superiority of simpler integration concepts, such as REST, versus the more complex SOAP and WS-* standards bodes very well for continuing the inexorable deployment of SOA in organizations of all sizes.

Technologists wrested SOA away from the marketers (thanks cloud!) and began to implement the concepts to solve business problems without telling the boss.