You read it here first: The term service-oriented architecture shall be renamed to message-oriented architecture. SOA shall become MOA.

Well, not really. It won’t happen, even though it should.

The entire point of SOA is to achieve loose coupling between applications. That’s it. Loose coupling.

But that loose coupling has important second-order effects. It allows applications to evolve independently. It allows applications to scale independently. It allows applications to change deployment models independently. All without breaking one another.

As many have rightly pointed out, this goodness comes at a price: The only way to talk to a “service-oriented” application is to send it a message. You don’t get to see its types. You don’t know where it is really executing. You get to send it a message. It might send you a message in reply.

So, shouldn’t we call it, “Message-Oriented Architecture?”