It's scary, there's a new TLA (three letter acronym) looming large on the programming horizon. SOA, which stands for service-oriented architecture is definitely the new flavour of the month (judging by the 744,000 hits on Google). People are pushing it as fixing all the problems of object oriented programming (OOP). Lots of people are going even further and claiming that SOA is the long awaited panacea for our distributed web-based applications.
So is SOA going to be as influential as OOP? Will it replace OOP? Is it a better approach to programming than OOP? Is it really the silver bullet? Or, should we just say no to yet another TLA? The short answer is that I believe SOA is a useful approach to building distributed web-based applications but is not the be-all and end-all of distributed programming. The longer answer will, I hope, come from reading the rest of this column!
