K Dryllerakis

The following very interesting article asks the question “SOA doesn’t really exist, does it?”.

The term “Service Oriented Architecture‿ implies that there is something special about architecture when it comes to service orientation, Web services, XML, loose coupling and all the wonderful blessings of the past 5 years in this wave. But if you look at it, there really isn’t much special about the good, old, proven architectural principles once you throw services into the picture.

Robert Filman has an interesting article in the IEEE Internet Computing magazine [January/February 2005 (Vol. 9, No. 1) ISSN: 1089-7801 ] concerning the Postmodern software development:

Art stands in contrast to science, engineering,
manufacturing, and fashion. Science distills
knowledge into principles and laws; art recognizes
that there are human choices in activities. Combine
art with an attention to economy and we get
engineering, like the computer science holy grail
of “software engineering�. Doing something following
a well-defined, low-skill plan yields
manufacturing. Choosing among equivalent possibilities
is fashion. Designing a computer is an art.
Designing one that people can afford is engineering.
Building one from that design is manufacturing.
Picking the color for the computer case is
fashion.

The following quote encapsulates well one of the major problem of our times:

Instead of teaching people that OO is a type of design, and giving them design principles, people have taught that OO is the use of a particular tool. We can write good or bad programs with any tool. Unless we teach people how to design, the language matters very little. The result is that people do bad designs with these languages and get very little value from them.

David Parnas (famed ACM Fellow, co-founder of information hiding, modularization, software product families and other seminal contributions)
quoted in No Silver Bullet Refired, by Frederick Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month.

Of course, it can otherwise be stated as: a fool with a tool is still a fool.