JavaZone 2011 - Do I still hate SOA?

At JavaZone 2005, I gave a talk with the title "Why I hate SOA". In the talk, I outlined several weaknesses with the then much-hyped term Service Oriented Architecture. Six years have passed, and I have learned much. The question is: Has SOA learned the same things?
In this talk, I will outline the real value proposition of Service Oriented Architecture: That of focusing on the services your business provides, both to human and computer users. By focusing on the business services, small, feature-oriented teams can deliver value. The thinking and tools of SOA can be used to serve the customers of the business or they can distract a project for its real goals.
I will examine three shortcomings in many approaches to SOA: The focus on tools, the focus on reuse, and the use of SOA as an application architecture. Tools, reuse and application architecture have their place, but once they take the driver seat instead of delivering services to the user of the business, things can go wrong.
The integration tools of SOA, when applied wrong, conceal the reality of most projects: 90% of integration problems can only be solved by people talking together. The reuse vision of SOA, when applied wrong, conceal the reality of most projects: Reuse is a most often trap, not an opportunity. Using SOA as an application architecture conceal the reality of most projects: Organizing developers as mindless cogs will force them to behave mindlessly.
The talk will be filled with real world examples.
Johannes Brodwall

Johannes Brodwall

Johannes Brodwall is a Chief Scientist at Steria. He teaches architecture and development to Sterias developers and acts as lead architect on large projects. He’s interested in fostering a culture of improve in the software development community and organizes the popular Oslo XP meetup as well as the annual Smidig conferences in Oslo.
He is opinionated and occasionally annoying, and has been so at the last ten JavaZone conferences. In 2006, he gave a talk entitled "Why I hate SOA". He no longer hates SOA.