My old boss’s boss seems like he was in a downer mood yesterday. First, he blogged about the “Myth of Reuse in SOA“, then the “Achilles Heel of SOA“. Actually, truth be told, I agree with him on both counts.
I slam the door on the reuse argument every time it comes up in my new job. Actually, I slam the door on what I call “Naive Reuse”. When John talks factoring for agility, he’s talking about a form of reuse – similar to how use “reuse” code when you refactor. What does it mean to refactor service? How about refactoring your enterprise?
As for the Achilles Heel “data problem”, I think that’s an artifact of the prevailing stateless request/response mindset most people have about services that I touched on yesterday. I think Pat Helland described a very good approach for dealing with data in an SOA, but I haven’t seen it implemented broadly. Rest assured, many of the concepts Pat described are at the forefront of my thinking as my new project takes shape.