Service-orientation is all about services!!! 🙂 Services communicate through the exchange of messages. Hence, messages are important and the focus should be on their structure and their role into message exchange patterns. Service orientation promotes encapsulation, promotes boundary preservation. We shouldn't allow details specific to our administrative domain to leak beyond our service boundaries.

Web Services can be used to realise the service-oriented approach when building distributed applications. Yes, CORBA can be used too. Also DCOM. I am sure many other distributed computing technologies could be used too. However, each technology promotes/favours a particular architectural style. CORBA and DCOM promote (but not mandate) object-orientation as the architectural style for building applications. I believe that WS technologies promote service orientation although one could (ab)use them in different ways 🙂

I understand the need to think about legacy applications and that companies must keep their customers happy. So if customers want to use Web Services technologies in order to build their object-oriented systems, why not? Let's encourage them <update>to do the wrong thing</update> (e.g., CORBA binding to WSDL). I don't want to restart the old argument on why WSDL is not yet another object IDL (post 1, post 2, post 3) but it seems that we are treating it as such. I think we are forgetting the importance of SOAP, the importance of the message. The Indigo people get it.

So... I would like to start a campaign for the promotion of SOAP, the "love the message campaign" or "love SOAP campaign". Here's a ribbon to go with it. What do you think? Can we make this happen? Can we make people believers? Spread the word!!! 🙂