Ebenezer Ikonne

John blogs this: A tirade against SOA and Distributed Objects.  This is an older post, but something I've been itching to comment on.

As much as I agree with John that “fundamentally” objects should not be distributed, I believe that a large number of applications that are not (simple) “desktop” or “web” applications require distribution due to business reasons that I won't get into here.  I think where MS and everyone else needs to get better is at educating the “average” developer as to the “how”, “when” and “where“ of these tools.

Take SOA for instance.  SOA is “way of doing things” that has unfortunately become tied to a certain technology stack - Web Services.  Hence folks assume that if they are developing Web Services, they are doing SOA.  This is a notion that has to be corrected.  This is also predicated by the fact that many developers/architects equate SOA to equal Distributed Objects (as I think John's blog possibly suggests) making Web Services (what seems to be the technology of choice) a “better” DCOM, RMI, Remoting or CORBA.  Unfortunately this is also fundamentally wrong and instead of rehasing why, I'll just direct everyone to Web Services are NOT Distributed Objects.  To make matters worse, with  the release of Indigo, I believe MS is actually adding fuel to the fire and allowing the misconception to grow simply because everything is handled primarily by one stack even though an “SOA solution” would have different requirements.  I personally would like for the “Remoting“ stack to remain separate long-term, but then again, I'm sure people smarter than me really thought this one out.  The one good thing about this is that it allows guys like me to spend more time blogging about stuff like this.  I'm sure I'll have more to say on this.