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About 3 month ago, I was charged to do a presentation and a demo explaining what is SOA composition.it wasn't easy to do it because latest eclipse version (neon) doesn't support BPEL projects any more, Eclipse Luna and an extension helped me in this situation. From that time there's some questions that roam around in my mind : why there's no new tutoriel about SOA composition ? Are these architectures are deprecated ? if yes why are they ?

Dmk
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I do think (and this is an opinion) that SOAP/SOA/ESB/BPEL is obsolete and taken over by RESTful Architectures. By RESTful I don't mean things that have a primitive JSON+HTTP API, but real distributed applications, where endpoints are not dumb, but define the part of the workflow that belongs to them.

So, the two conceptual things colliding are: Do I want a central "smart" component (like ESB, and pure BPEL services) and dumb (for example SOAP) endpoints. Or do I rather have no central components and smart "endpoints" (like REST resources).

I think conceptually the latter is the clear winner in many cases (not all arguably). There are practical problems however. Companies always like to centralize. Centralization looks "neat" and "tidy", especially for an Enterprise Architect. Until the central components grow out of proportions that is.

One of my clients introduced an ESB just last year, so it's definitely not over. But I do think (again, this is just my opinion), that we already tried centralized architectures and monoliths. They always end in the "legacy system" bin, that can not be replaced because it does everything. So we know where they lead, we need to try something different. :)

Robert Bräutigam
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  • ESB was introduced because smart endpoints ended up in a mess. ESB took over and grew into an over-complicated expensive beast. We got fed up with ESB so we come back to smart endpoints implemented with REST. Simple and efficient. During the time REST API gateways and specifications emerge. We might be coming to centralization trend again. I believe the best is to make a right choice what has to be centralized and what is better to leave distributed. – KarelHusa Mar 21 '17 at 08:50