The Problem with Service-Oriented Architecture

This chapter discusses the problems with the service-oriented architecture (SOA). The chapter reveals that business managers relish the idea of SOA. They widely believe SOA will get them to composite applications immediately. The wonderful part of SOA is its ability to pull together adopted and well-understood protocols, software development coding techniques, and a governance model. These lead to common use of SOA message patterns to exchange standards-based business documents in a business process. The problematic issues in SOA are driven by the gap between management's buy-in to SOA and the ability of software architects and developers to deliver production-worthy software code that achieves user satisfaction. This chapter introduces SOA from a performance and scalability perspective. Bosworth's issue is reflected in industry and institutional emphasis on document definitions (schema) and workflow message exchange patterns. Many enterprises began their SOA efforts by forming industry associations to define the document schemas they had in common.