SOA = Service Oriented Application

I see a disturbing trend out there where people who are working on a single application say that they are creating an SOA. When they decompose the application into modules, instead of calling them subsystems or components as we use to, they call them services. Then they put a WSDL on them, register them in a registry, and bam they tell me they have a SOA. I guess that is appropriate if SOA to them means Service Oriented Application. I just hope they don't go around telling the business that now that they have an SOA everything's going to be much more agile, they're going to save a bunch of money from reuse, systems will be more interoperable, etc., etc. What are the chances that they're going to get any use from those services outside of that single application? Probably zero. So given that, how's the business going to be more agile? Beats me. Since those "services" and their WSDLs were designed from the perspective of that single application, what are the chances that they will be interoperable with others who might want to use them? Just because you're using WSDL/SOAP/HTTP doesn't guarantee you interoperability.

soa