I don't know about you, but I am getting a little tired of the apparent need within the developer community to create new buzzwords and terminology to describe what we do. When I say the developer community, I am talking about marketing geeks who work for software companies and the journalists who write about these wonderful new "architectures." Real developers understand the whole "call a routine–return a result" process without needing to name it. The term that really is sticking in my craw these days is service-oriented architecture (SOA).

As I flip through the countless software and IT magazines I receive, I see article after article on how to implement SOA. And, of course, you can't discuss SOA without getting into such esoterica as object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD), enterprise architecture (EA) frameworks, and business process modeling (BPM). If you truly are one of the cognoscenti, you would focus on service-oriented analysis and design (SOAD) instead of the humble SOA. I recently saw a posting on an SOA blog likening this terminology to "food-oriented lunch."

What initially attracted me to information technology was the simple elegance of not only the process but the theory behind the process. The closer to the machine I could get, the happier I was. It was lot more fun to write assembly code on a mainframe than run a COBOL batch. The more we abstract the process, the further we get from understanding what we are doing. I often suspect the evangelists for all these high-level abstractions are actually guys who never could get into the code but were able to find a life in obfuscation. Consider the following terms, all of which I encountered in an introduction to SOA: service choreography, service bus middleware pattern, business process governance. The day I schedule a meeting with my dev team and announce we are going to discuss governance is the day I lose my last bit of credibility. I was scanning job postings and resumes on an online techie service recently. In a major metropolitan area, there were 2,619 tech jobs posted–two jobs specified a need for experience with service-oriented architecture. J2EE appeared in more than 200 postings. It seems like the guys in the trenches care more about skill sets than mind-sets.