As I perused the conference session schedule in preparation for attending the INTEROP New York Conference, I noticed a session called SOA: Hype or Happening?. Although conference organizers tend to favor controversial topics to draw audiences, I think a better concept would be "A Checkpoint on the Progress of the SOA Platform." Nevertheless, I will try to attend that session.

In my minds eye, SOA in the real world has more to do with issues such as:

• Should our business process designs rely on process choreography or orchestration?
• Should our service registry, and therefore, our software development organization support both SOAP and REST (Representational State Transfer) Web service models?
• How should our service bus pipeline structures be modeled to support message flows in a service bus?
• How do I guarantee message delivery (that is, provide transactional management) within my SOA?
• What is the best communication action for asynchronous behavior in a service bus -- route versus publish/subscribe versus service callout?
• How do we develop advanced reporting schemes (log, alert, and so on) in our service bus in support of non-classic use cases?