In a presentation at TheServerSide Java Symposium last week, Gregor Hohpe, enterprise integration practice leader at Chicago-based ThoughtWorks Inc. and co-author of the book Enterprise Integration Patterns, played down some of the hype around service-oriented architecture (SOA) and offered some practical advice to developers and architects.

According to Hohpe, SOA lacks a consistent definition throughout the development community.

Hohpe suggested some "alternative" meanings for SOA such as: same old architecture, some other architecture, SOAP without the P and stupid over-hyped acronym. His point was that the term SOA is overused and advised the audience to not look for one proper formula.

Hohpe advised the audience to forget about SOAP and design patterns. The characteristics of a service are that it is well-defined and self-contained, independent of consumer context and accessible without individual deployment.