I’m Starting to Feel Sick Now

It made me sad, you know. I recently read an article written by an accepted expert in the field, about ‘What Everyone Needs to Know about SOA’. The author wrote about the value of reusability of software functionality and described how we’ve been improving the way functional components can be ‘picked up’ for reuse.

A nice story indeed, but, given the header of the article, which promises to explain the major drawbacks of the use of Service Oriented Architecture, things everyone needs to know about, IMHO the author refuses to mention the possibly one most important issue left.

Even if you can really easily pick up your functional components and use them in a new context (and SOA might make this possible), if you don’t have a way to agree on exactly WHAT functionality you need and exactly WHAT functionality is offered, you will not be able to leverage the possibilities of reuse whatsoever.

The article I read gives a highly technical view on SOA, however the author added some catches, challenges and advice from a broader perspective. But still, no reference to data semantics, to the idea of WHAT data exactly to exchange. We see this happen in so many writings and presentations about systems integration in general and SOA in particular. And it makes me sad, because every expert in the field can at least see and understand the need for semantic agreement in any kind of collaboration, or am I wrong? For how long have we been connecting systems now?

Why then does almost everyone in the field neglect this subject completely? How can it be that an article about What Everyone Needs to Know about SOA lacks even a simple reference to this matter?

I accuse SOA vendors of making big promises while intentionally leaving their customers alone with this important issue. Not one of the vendors I spoke to could be of any significance here, for example by giving insight in what it’s all about, or by offering powerful semantic tooling functionality. So, I undertook this endeavor myself, not being a complete greenhorn in the matter myself. But this practice is not helping SOA to be accepted and leveraged!

I can’t state it often enough: Reuse of functionality and communication in general can be of any value only if both the HOW and the WHAT are taken into account. You will need semantic descriptions. Be prepared for this! That’s a big part of what this web log is about.

You know, in the Dutch language, ‘SOA’ also stands for the range of sexually transmittable diseases. And being in this world of SOA for some time now, I am starting to feel bad now…

If you want to read the specific article yourself, it’s located
here.