Ron Ten-Hove has two interesting blog entries, one talking about how SOA Services != RPC and another one about the relation to business process automation. In his view, the most important difference is the separation of business process logic from the implementation of business functions.
I know this is a common view, but I disagree — to me, BPM, business process automation, and SOA are not only two, but even three different, orthogonal concepts. The value of SOA, in my opinion, is its emphasis on autonomous, language-agnostic and platform-independent services that share a common interface technology; it does not really matter whether they implement a business process or some technical function.
Stefan,
So are you saying that services really are just a form of RPC, and that their inherent value resides in being “…autonomous, language-agnostic and platform-independent services that share a common interface technology”? Isn’t that a good description of CORBA as well?