It's always good to end the year with some sort of controversy, and thus one has sprung up. I'm talking about Ronan Bradly's post about The danger of "automatic" service creation and how it's counter productive to reuse.

From Ronan:

"However, my gripe is more fundamental: The idea you could even consider generating any kind of service automatically from code must be the antithesis of SOA."

"The automatic approach to service generation tends to result in hardwired ties and dependencies significantly reducing the likelihood that the service will be reused."

Ronan was pointing to the latest product release from Iona, but other are taking the same approach.

Of course Joe McKendrick put on his white shirt and bow tie and jumped between the two, and had some really good points about the topic, and good 3 good blog days out of this issue. This included some good points made by Iona's Steve Vinoski

At the essence of this is code generation, or in the case of Iona code transformation (JAX-WS 2.0.). This approach, at least the underlying concept, has been around for years, while the enabling standard is relatively new.

So, my take? While this approach will be compelling for some with words like "automatic," the reality is that generating services ties you to the technology that generated it. No matter what standard or agreements you can put forth. Thus, if you're generating services, those services are going to be coupled to the product that generated them. Therefore, reuse, agility, loose coupling, will all be things that are more difficult to achieve.

Thus, the notion? Bad. Indeed, it's a nice thought but it just does not work that way in the real world. I hope people get this concept before any damage is done.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on December 22, 2006 07:29 AM