SOA Breakthroughs

Anyone working on enterprise systems in the last 10 years will remember the initial tenets of Service Orientated Architecture were to decouple applications and to provide a well defined service interface, which can be reused by applications and composed into business processes. The idea of reuse and composition made SOA an attractive proposition that sent thousands of organizations on a very challenging treasure hunt. We have since read SOA's obituary and its resurrection with many stories of woe peppered with some success, but with very few achieving the holy grail of SOA. Meanwhile, the web has essentially become a service oriented platform, where information and functionality is a available through an API; the Web succeeded where the enterprise largely failed.

This success can be attributed to the fact that the web has been decentralized in its approach and has adopted less stringent technologies to become service oriented. Many early APIs were written using SOAP but now REST is the dominant force (though some are more REST than others). The publication of REST APIs has been rapidly increasing.