Grandpa's SOA

JJ complains about SOA misconceptions, including the widespread claim that "SOA is not new, people were doing SOA 30 years ago". And it's not just SOA that attracts claims like these. I meet people who claim they were doing BPM and workflow twenty years ago.

JJ believes we can date SOA ("as we know it today") to the appearance of XML-RPC in early 1998. If we define SOA and BPM in technological terms, involving the use of a particular set of technologies, then it is certainly difficult to see how SOA and BPM could predate these technologies.

But if we define SOA and BPM in architectural terms, involving certain styles and patterns, then it is quite possible that some people were experimenting with these styles and patterns perhaps long before the associated technologies appeared. Indeed, according to writers like Lewis Mumford, this kind of pre-technological experimentation may be a vital step in the development of new technologies.

To take an analogy from electronic music, I am quite comfortable with the idea that Karlheinz Stockhausen and Delia Derbyshire were producing synthesized music before synthesizers existed. (See my post on Art and the Enterprise.)

But before modern synthesizers existed, the field of electronic music involved a very small number of brilliant composers (and a slightly larger number of not-so-brilliant composers), devoting enormous effort and expense to produce a very small amount of music (of varying quality).

Likewise, there were no doubt a very small number of brilliant software designers thirty years ago, doing amazing stuff with CICS and PL/1. Okay, so there wasn't a critical mass of network-accessible reusable IT assets then, but nor was there in 1998 either.

Mass adoption of industrial-strength SOA has only been feasible in the last few years. Thirty years ago, we didn't use the language of service-orientation. By the early 1990s there were lots of people in the ODP world looking beyond CORBA and talking seriously about services. And by the late 1990s there were lots of vendors trying to talk up the SOA vision.

The trouble is that when people talk about SOA, they typically lump together a load of different stuff. Some of this stuff was possible with CICS and PL/1 if you were very clever and your employer had deep pockets; some of it is possible today with the latest web service platforms; and some of it really isn't available yet.

How much of SOA is new is an impossible and subjective question. (See my post on the Red Queen Effect.) SOA champions spend half their time explaining how radical SOA could be, and half their time reassuring people how tried-and-tested and safe and based on sound principles it all is. So maybe grandpa is right some of the time, after all.