Comparing Service-Oriented and Distributed Object Architectures

Service-Oriented Architectures have been proposed as a replacement for the more established Distributed Object Architectures as a way of developing loosely-coupled distributed systems. While superficially similar, we argue that the two approaches exhibit a number of subtle differences that, taken together, lead to significant differences in terms of their large-scale software engineering properties such as the granularity of service, ease of composition and differentiation – properties that have a significant impact on the design and evolution of enterprise-scale systems. We further argue that some features of distributed objects are actually crucial to the integration tasks targeted by service-oriented architectures.