Comments on: Service Oriented Architecture is your Ticket to Hell

By: markez linda

markez linda — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:53:57 +0000

I really liked your blog!

By: The War On Bullshit » Blog Archive » Four Simple Truths that Undermine Software Architecture

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:30:46 +0000

[...] Related articles: Service Oriented Architecture is your Ticket to Hell [...]

By: Avery Lin

Avery Lin — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:20:27 +0000

Thanks for sharing guys.

By: Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:14:27 +0000

What you want is an access forms VBA app on top of SQL Server 2005, I run a multi-million dollar corporation on the back of that baby.

Object Orientation is for kids who don’t understand the procedural paradigm. Now COBOL 2 that was a PROPER programming language…

By: Great reads for this week « Computing Life

Great reads for this week « Computing Life — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:15:37 +0000

[...] Is SOA bullshit SOA architecture is not new (raganwald) Code/Data Seperataions vs Encapsulation – (raganwald) [...]

By: John

John — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 16:08:06 +0000

…it’s the ol’ Chicken and Egg.

By: John

John — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 16:04:16 +0000

Cyclic dependency…

By: Kavan Wolfe

Kavan Wolfe — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 05:42:57 +0000

Thanks for all the comments. Here are a few selective responses:

@Daniel: My point was *not* that the OO paradigm is superior to the SO paradigm, only that the latter has some glaring deficiencies. Sure, some people use it successfully, but some people use Windows successfully – that doesn’t mean Windows or SOA don’t have serious problems.

@Derek: Spring won’t work when you don’t have control (or access to the source of) the services you’re using or the ones using your service.

@CPinto: your business is not agile if you can’t change your code base without breaking an unknown number of dependent subsystems

@eng: I’m not comparing SOA to other approaches.

@Arnon: I like points 1,2 and 3. I don’t know what you mean by point 4

@Kit: WRT point 1, see Erl’s books. WRT point 2, in a marketplace with many service providers, services are not organized into hierarchies. That’s why we can get dependency loops.

@John: thanks for the reminder. It’s been a while since I read Hafstadter. I wasn’t using ‘Strange loops’ in the technical sense. I should have said whacky loops or unexpected loops or something.

By: John

John — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:37:13 +0000

A strange loop is where you take a second order concept (i.e. an ‘emergent’ phenomena) and apply it in the context of its first order concepts (i.e. its ’substance’). So… what you have here isn’t a strange loop, it’s just an infinite regress.

By: Kit Davies

Kit Davies — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 09:01:23 +0000

Though SOA has issues, I don’t think the ones you raise are them.

1. BUFA: the only things that really need to be nailed early are the interfaces. Their implementations can use agile development, and I agree that fixing the interfaces does narrow the scope for agility somewhat. But SOA is intended to take collaborative SW development outside dev teams and departments, and I cannot see how that can be done productively without clear contracts between the components, namely the interfaces. SOA should run along just fine with a well-considered set of interfaces.

2. Loops: in reality, this is not going to happen. Services depend on other services because they incorporate them or add extra functionality to them. With each added level of service invocation, the chance for a sublevel to call a superlevel becomes less likely since each superlevel adds extra functionality not needed by the sublevels. This is entirely consistent with other procedural designs, eg using C.