For better or worse, SOA (service-oriented architecture) continues to be the current industry fad. As SOA continues along the “hype curve” (a term I’m borrowing from Gartner), more and more people are starting to realize that SOA isn’t a silver bullet, and that it doesn’t actually replace n-tier client/server or object-orientation. What will most likely happen over the next couple years, is that SOA will fall into the “pit of disillusionment” (part of the hype curve, that I think of as the “pit of despair”), and many people will decide, as a result, that it is totally useless. This will happen, not in small part, because some organizations are investing way too much money into SOA now, when it is overly hyped – and they’ll feel betrayed when “reality” sets in. After a period of disrepute, SOA may then rise to a “plateau of productivity”, where it will finally be used to solve the problems it is actually good at solving. Some technologies don’t live through the “despair” part of the process. Sometimes the harsh light of reality is too bright, and the technology can’t hold up. Other times, a competing technology or concept hits the top of its hype curve, derailing a previous technology. Over the next very few years, we’ll see if SOA holds up to the despair or not. This is a pattern Gartner has observed for virtually all technologies over many, many years. If you think about any technology introduced over the past 20 years or more, almost all of them have following this pattern: over-hyping, over-reacting-to-reality and finally used-as-a-real-solution. My colleague and mentor, David Chappell, recently blogged about some of the realities people are discovering as they actually move beyond the hype and try to apply SOA. It turns out, not surprisingly, that achieving real benefits in terms of reuse is much harder than the SOA evangelists would have anyone believe. I think this is because SOA focuses on only one part of the problem: syntactic coupling. SOA, or at least service-oriented design and programming, is very much centered around rules for addressing and binding to services, and around clear definition of syntactic contracts for the API and message data sent to and from services. And that’s all good! Minimizing coupling at the syntactic level is absolutely critical, and SOA has moved us forward in this space, picking up where EAI (enterprise application integration) left off in the 90’s. Unfortunately, syntactic coupling is the easy part. Semantic coupling
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