Wilfred Thinking Aloud

Written in the palm of my hand

A quick entry, to proove myself that it is possible to edit blogs from your palm. If you care to know, it isn't really convenient. Going crazy over all the times i've misspelled thimgsr htegjk, aaaaaargh

Done on a Sony Clie TH55 with wireless support.

SOA vs. soa

The ongoing discussion on the meaning of the word SOA is reminding me of the of the discussion on the meaning of Component Based Development in the past. It could probably also have reminded me of the discussion on the word Internet in the past - if I wouldn't have been too busy riding my skateboard and reading comics at that time.

If you do see the resemblance between what we are going through today, and the rise of the Internet - well, then you are in good company: Doug Kaye is covering some of that in his excellent book "Loosely Coupled: The Missing Pieces of Web Services". If you don't know this book, then make sure to get it now. It's an excellent guide for knowing how to ride this new wave in the industry, without being required to know all about the WS-* standards.

The reason why I bring all of this up is this: the introduction of Richard Stevens' monumental work on TCP/IP contains this little line:

"...The word internet means different things depending on whether it's capitalized or not.

The lowercase internet means multiple networks connected together, using a common protocol suite. The uppercase Internet refers to the collection of hosts (over one million) around the world that can communicate with each other using TCP/IP. While the Internet is an internet, the reverse is not true."

I say, let's introduce a similar distinction between SOA and soa: in this case the "common protocol suite" based on widely embraced standards including orchestration and identity standards would be the upper case version: 'SOA'. In that case the term 'soa' would be reserved for other flavours of service oriented architectures, like Jini, JXTA and what else is out there. As a consequence, the following would apply: "While SOA is an soa, the reverse is not true."