Wednesday, October 01, 2008

My experience with SOA - part I: Myths

It had been slightly over an year since I started working on a SOA project and people have been asking me to share my experiences and learnings. I decided to write a series of posts on my blog focusing on one aspect everytime. In this entry, I'll address the myths about SOA.
1. If your project has web services then you are doing SOA: Funny does it sound, isnt it? I have been hearing this statement for a long time. Web services is just an architectural style that facilitates achieving the fundamental principles of SOA.
2. ESB is SOA: another popular myth. SOA is technology neutral and is not coupled to one particular way of doing it. This myth defeats the core principles of SOA - loose coupling and vendor diversity.
3. SOA is out of the box: Well, SOA is not the panacea to all the business problems. There is no out of the box product that guarantees this. There is a popular myth that simply wrapping the legacy systems with web services to achieve SOA.

The above myths are mostly from a technical perspective, I have not touched upon myths from a business angle. There are myths that SOA is easy (umm, I wish it were that easy), SOA is very expensive, SOA is always a flop, etc.

In the next post, I'd cover the core principles of SOA.

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