I spent most of my weekend diving into the published SOA materials on the IBM developerWorks site. If you have not been there it is just stuffed full of great content on SOA, Web Services, Modeling, Design, and Patterns. One of the items that struck me was in how big blue was guiding readers to design and deliver service oriented systems.

IBM has something called Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture guidance. There are numerous whitepapers and references in the developerWorks materials about this guidance. I have not actually read all of the material yet but I wanted to make mention of it because I love it when an acronym has some hidden meaning. This is always so impressive to me because of how clever it seems when it does not look forced.

The acronym of course is SOMA which instantly brought back memories of 12th grade english class and Aldous Huxley. Those of you that have not read "Brave New World" by Huxley will likely not see the irony in this acronym but I sure do. Many believe that Soma was representitive of "The Perfect Drug". People were constantly taking Soma holidays or using it to escape from issues in their life.

Now I have not been able to find anywhere that IBM is admitting to the mapping between Huxley and their Service Oriented modeling guidance. If this is not intentional then I have to admit I am very disappointed. The analogy just starts to write itself. SOA when done correctly certainly has the capability of being your companies "Perfect Drug". Once we learn as an industry how to apply best practices to model and deliver these services we are certain to avoid the "hangovers" associated with malpractice and misuse.

So it would seem all I need is something to consume that will help me become illuminated to the possibilities that service-orientation provides. If that consumable can leave me with no side effects and simply thirsting for more then I will have to give in. So if SOA is your thing you may want to see what SOMA can do for you :)

For more on SOMA Click Here