If I had a hammer:
Something struck me recently after an in-depth discussion with a couple of my ‘thinking’ buddies – SOA isn’t really about web services. What’s more in realility SOA isn’t really about technology! SOA is about how businesses deliver the services that make them their income. In fact a very wise man told me that SOA had been around since man started trading with man. His point was that in order to support the ‘service’ a business provided it needed to have an ‘architecture’ in place that supported that aim. So if the service is to supply food you need a shop, a store room, a supply chain and on. This, he told me, was a Service Orientated Business with a Service Orientated Architecture supporting it!
Now that is quite a great way of thinking about SOA. Instead of behaving too up our own technology arses we should take in the big picture of what we are providing and for what purpose.
So to my question – SOA without web services? Of course we can have SOA without web services!
I suppose what my question should be more succinctly “Technology Aspects of SOA – can they be web-service less?”
Again I believe the answer is most definitely yes, yes, yes. What we are talking about is bringing disparate systems together to provide a service rather than an application orientate way of supporting my/your business.
