
SOA and the Tar Pit of Irrelevancy (2009) - geezerjay
http://nealford.com/memeagora/2009/04/22/soa_tarpit_irrelevancy.html
======
wDcBKgt66V8WDs
The bits about code vs doodleware hit hard for me. With a certain proprietary
database that I did customer support for, the encouraged development path was
doodleware. It was genuinely very nice if you were doing some toy project, but
it quickly became unmanageable. The vendor was on their 2nd of (currently 3?)
iterations of doodleware for this database, so the tooling for it was crap and
would never get better as they would soon abandon it.

I have done in-depth analysis and refactors of dozens of these doodleware
objects purely with vim macros. Portable gVim was literally the only thing I
could get on the customer supplied Windows laptop to do this job. Export
(through a semi-manual hack) dozens/hundreds of 10k line XML files, build a
vim macro, cry, cross my fingers that the manual hack to replace the
doodleware objects would work, cross them again that the objects weren't
irreparably damaged.

Now I'm seeing doodleware on the rise in cloud platforms, making business
process flows "easy". Connecting different services "effortlessly".

~~~
marktangotango
Service oriented architecture is alive and well in the form of ESB (enterprise
service bus) (camel, mule, spring integration are examples). They’re also xml
hell imo, that typically hit all the bad parts of xml; xsl, xslt, versioning,
the idiotic half support for namespacing. No, no, not bitter at all :)

------
human20190310
The essential quote is toward the end:

"The term SOA has been so co-opted by vendors trying to sell stuff that I
think it will die off as a term."

I think it did! I definitely didn't remember what it stood for. (The author
does provide a definition, but it's on the 25th time he uses the acronym :) )

~~~
wrs
The term is now “microservices”.

~~~
sgt101
"let's refactor these sql statements as a stateless microservice"...

so we can service 500 users with between 10 and 100 requests a day.

------
currywurst
Substitute SOA for Kubernetes et al and it reads perfectly well :)

~~~
RickJWagner
I spent quite a while with SOA, but I find Kubernetes a little different.

To me, SOA is more about the implementation-- especially the old WSDL-driven
part.

But Kubernetes is more about infrastructure. The applications are written in
different styles and different languages. K8S is more like a platform than
anything else, to me.

~~~
flukus
> To me, SOA is more about the implementation-- especially the old WSDL-driven
> part.

That was one of the tragedies of SOA. The S was meant to be service as in
windows service but it was co-opted to be service as in web service.

Had it been called Daemon Oriented Architecture things may have turned out
differently.

The same thing is playing out now with micro services.

~~~
geezerjay
> The S was meant to be service as in windows service but it was co-opted to
> be service as in web service.

That assertion makes no sense as SOA is a software architecture approach and
the communication between services has no impact on the system's architecture.

~~~
flukus
Communication between services has a huge impact on system architecture. A web
service is an RPC mechanism, whether it's SOAP, REST, CORBA or whatever, it's
nothing new and didn't need a new name. SOA was supposed to be message driven,
usually through an ESB or something similar, MSMQ was popular at the time.

------
phs318u
Having pre-dated SOA, been heavily involved in implementing SOA, and then
watched SOA die on the vine, the overriding lesson was that technologists too
often focus on syntactic coupling and completely forget about semantic
coupling (by far, the harder problem).

For all it's highly proscribed, heavyweight, over-engineered approach, SOA
could have succeeded if the focus of implementations been on the semantic
coupling problem.

Sadly, I see little evidence that the majority of the current crop of
technologists have learned this lesson (irrespective of the technology
choices).

[http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/SemanticCouplingTheElephantInTh...](http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/SemanticCouplingTheElephantInTheSOARoom.aspx)

------
fake-name
Somehow they never even define "SOA". What?

As far as I know, SOA means "safe operating area", and I have _no_ idea how
the hell this pertains to _anything_ they're discussing.

Google tells me SOA _probably_ means "service oriented architecture" (or the
"society of actuaries"), but geez.

~~~
tottenhm
> Somehow they never even define "SOA". What?

"SOA" means "microservices for Gen X'ers".

"Microservices" means "SOA for millenials".

I don't know what Baby Boomers called it.

~~~
pstuart
> I don't know what Baby Boomers called it.

CORBA

