The phrase “Don’t be a SOAsaurus” is being bandied about on Twitter and the like and it got me thinking about using that particular analogy to describe SOA Web Services practises and contrast them with the clever little RESTful API Service mammals that maybe saw off the big, ugly lizards.

Before getting into computing I did spend some time in Geology so I’m coming at this argument from a slightly odd standpoint. For any Geologists reading I was structural, ophioites and terrain docking. We used to look down on this palaeontology stuff and everyone looked down on the geophysicists.

To recap the dinosaurs then. We know them from the fossil record. To become a fossil is a one in a bazillion chance so there have to be a lot of you about. By definition any fossil you find must have come from a wildly successful species. So SOAsaurus must be some form of compliment. On top of that, dinosaurs (as we commonly refer to them) lasted over one hundred million years, dominated the land, sea and sky AND gave birth to the mammals. By that analogy REST wouldn’t be here but for SOA. In the same way SOA has had it’s time in the press and still continues to have it’s time in enterprise. Fully half of the enquiries Gartner specialists like @DavidLinthicum get are from people working on SOA, installing service based architectures XML and developing new services.

The analogy extends to our RESTful mammals as well. At night they had the advantage of heat to go out scavenging dinosaurs and stealing eggs. In the same way I see technologies scavenged from SOA; sledgehammer to crack a nut UDDI re-emerges as API portal, WSDL becomes WADL. Vendors see that the wheel is being reinvented so technologies like service and security gateways extend their functionality to encompass both worlds.

When the dinosaurs did go it had taken the combined effects of millennia of climate change from the volcanic eruptions forming a decent portion of what is now India plus the impact of a meteorite big enough to form a 200km wide crater. That was big enough to wipe out two thirds of all species on the planet. It reminds me of a major UK banking group I’ve worked with whose mainframe still ran on token ring and used a protocol older than I am! Big, successful technologies are hard to kill off for several reasons, primarily they work for the frame of reference they were put in for. We’ll be living with SOA practices running organisations for many decades yet.

But maybe I got the analogy wrong. REST isn’t the mammal after all and the dinosaurs never died out. They survived by ditching the weight and becoming more agile with less in the way of teeth. In the same way its not hard to imagine why developers want to get rid of the stack of J2EE, XML, SOAP, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-PolicyForSecureReliablePolicyIdentityFederationPolicy…. REST represents the birds and one’s about to crap on your shoulder sometime soon.

I think I agree with SOAsaurus, I like the term. SOA gets to live as Argentinosaurus, Compsognathus or Protoceratops. REST could be Albatross, Turkey or Penguin (okay, now I’m poking fun). As Archaeopteryx was no doubt fond of saying; there’s room for a bit of both.

Of course this is all fine discussing the mammals and the dinosaurs but it's the bacteria that use us and let us live in the end. Any suggestion as to the computing equivalent?

Whether you’re a SOAsaurus seeking SOA governance, are looking to evolve using REST/SOA mediation, or are already walking upright with REST and need to manage APIs, we’ve got you covered.

I told you I was ill.

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