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If you follow my books marks (and who doesn't?!), you know I've been interested in SOAs recently. eWeek has an interesting, lengthy article on SOAs that isn't the usual short, hype-stuff. It's more along the lines of a good Baseline or CIO article (which are rare themselves). Anyhow, here's some bullets:

• SOA isn't 1-1 with SOAP:

  The SOA approach does not combine the code that's used for communication among processes with the code that performs the processes themselves. If a new communication protocol enters the picture, only the communication fabric requires alteration.

  ...

  When there isn't a clear distinction between the business process function and the interprocess communication plumbing, changes to either one become more difficult and the system is less likely to evolve.

• "At the same time that a team builds SOA components, it must also equip itself with the tools to test and coordinate those components."
• Just 'cause it's "standard," doesn't mean vendors will implement that standard correctly. And, your needs are probably non-standard: "Would-be SOA architects need to drill below a vendor's generic claim of support for a services standard and find out just how much work it will take to use that standard in real applications that meet enterprise standards of reliability."

• "I ask people, What do you want to accomplish businesswise?" said IBM Emerging Technologies Vice President Rod Smith in a conversation with eWEEK Labs this summer. "They tell me, 'I've got a supply chain; I've got business partners ?I want them to have access to my billing and other systems, and I want it to happen in 30 days.' People talk about business performance before they talk about application performance, so I've laid down a challenge to our folks to reduce the integration time down to a matter of hours."

As I was telling someone today, I'm a hype-jaundiced coder, so I still look on all this with a skeptical eye turned yellow by CORBA, J2EE, CASE, UML, OO, and every other technology that was going to save the programming world. One thing I like about SOA over those is the emphasis on non-technical things (though, J2EE had all it's "roles"). But, there's still not enough that I've encountered yet.

I'm a big believe that software development -- once you/the team reach a certain skill level -- is really about everything but coding (unless you're a team of one, in which case you can stay pure). We'll see how the people-part of SOA pans out.