Will SOA Succeed?

SOA is hot buzzword in the development community, all the major software companies adopt this buzzword and develop infrastructure to implement it but is SOA is reality or fiction.

The Idea behind SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is that different services are exposed using Web Services with a specific API, in this development of a new application would just need to write a workflow with steps in which each step would access a different Web Service.

There are several major problems with this SOA idea:

• Web Service API needs to be appropriate for each client/application which access it, and API can't be appropriate for each client/application.
• If the Client/Application needs to access several times the Web Service API to complete the task then there are several round-trips with XML-Soap parsing/de-parsing which take a lot of time
• Performance - Calling an EJB in RMI is much faster then calling Service using Web Service which need to translate objects to XML and XML to objects
• There is a problem to expose API in Web Service for example an API which get List of Objects and in which each application can be a Polymorphic of another Object, this can't be describe in WSDL file