Sean says “The industry only has itself to blame….Now the market thinks the tech. companies are pulling a stunt and they are largely right.” I for one blame the analysts, not tech companies. The analysts make their living inventing over-arching concepts and then going around to explain what they really mean, and how EII is really very different from the old-fashioned idea of EAI, and how an ESB is quite different from a MOM, ad nauseum. I see the tech companies (at least the smaller ones) jumping thru the analysts’ hoops on this stuff, trying hard not to be stuck in the “lower-left quadrant” by failing to ride the buzzword bandwagon.

I very much agree that ” Trying to convince customers that all the temporally coupled, three tiered architectures they had where, in reality,special cases of a beautiful new over-arching theory called SOA, has backfired. The dangerous bit here is the attempt to erect an over-arching theory over heterogenous reality. REST is another over-arching theory and needs to be treated with just as much skepticism. so that we don’t jump from the SOA frying pan into the REST fire.

Question for those who remember the gool ol’ days better than I do: Didn’t we go thru much the same hype / confusion cycle with OO in the early ’90s? Wasn’t OO declared DOA at some point early on when the “software ICs” vision didn’t materialize and the religious disputes of the sort “should a square be a subclass of rectangle” starting breaking out? Wasn’t C++ just as much of a hideous mass of misbegotten complexity as WS-* (and just as hated by the Smalltalk / Eiffel purists)?

There is little doubt that the “services revolution” (if it happens) will be seen in retrospect as underwhelming as the “OO revolution” does today … but that’s quite a ways from saying that it is DOA.