The End of SOA

I did an interview and a podcast [Update: here] at that Rails conference and the question came up in both, and in the hallway talk too: “What do you think we should do about SOA?” Which weirdly, nobody had asked me before, and I could find only one answer: “Don’t do anything. ‘SOA’ may have meant something once but it’s just vendor bullshit now.” Looking back, what happened was, certain software architects were uncomfortable with the framing that goes with the words “Web Services”; maybe because people think anything with “Web” in the name should be simple and lightweight and easy to set up. Thus SOA, which is so much more Enterprisey. Me, I want to go the other way. The crucial point is that Web-like things should be simple and lightweight and easy to set up; so I think the “Web” part of “Web Services” is more important than the “Services” part. SOA isn’t the future, Web style is.