Service Oriented Architecture Pitfalls

Abstract

The distributed software systems theory is comprehensively described and also deeply understood in academic community. The domain has its own interesting history of research and application. Almost every computer science graduate has some knowledge of distributed algorithms or fundamental properties and goals of such systems. And almost every software product nowadays is relying on some sort of a distributed system. It is therefore surprising that we are witnessing repeated failures of enterprise application integration middlewares, one of the most promising incarnations of the theory.

The enterprise software industry is aligning behind new attempt to deliver so called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which is supposed to fix the existing middleware problems and finally deliver an ecosystem of applications talking to each other seamlessly. Despite all the promises and rightful expectations, there is very high risk of yet another failure though. The goal of this paper is to suggest how to give SOA a chance.