Gartner Research calls it the "trough of disillusionment" -- every new technology's sophomore slump, after the early promise fades. That's where we are now with service-oriented architecture (SOA), said Marc Balcer, chief architect of ModelCompilers.com, at the start of his talk on model-driven SOA, presented at the Software Development West conference in Santa Clara, Calif last month. Balcer said he believes you have to look at SOA from both sides now: from the top (business level) down and from the bottom (IT level) up.
For the top-down view he quoted the Cutter Consortium's Mike Rosen: "SOA is concerned with the independent construction of services, which can be combined to realize meaningful, higher level business processes within the context of the enterprise."
