October 02, 2003

SOA in the context of EJB

I notice that Microsoft is largely trying to change the rules of the game for enterprise development by jumping onto the "services oriented architecture" bandwagon and making web services as the only way of doing SOA, and that SOA is something "new".

But most of these blog posts I see about SOA are all things I've seen written 4 to 5 years ago about EJB stateless session beans (and recently message driven beans).

Replace "data transfer object graph" with "XML document". I think I prefer the XML document for various reasons (interop + the new security services), but it's a fairly small change to the conceptual architecture because you typically bind the document to an object graph!

There are still many hard problems in distributed computing that aren't being solved by SOA and it's frustrating to see yet another community so excited about something that really isn't changing the world AS MUCH as they think it is, just like the EJB camp was in 1997... :-)

Posted by stu at October 2, 2003 08:13 AM