As with all powerful ideas, these idées fortes are works in progress. If anything, they bring up more questions than answers. Yes, we’ve made substantial progress so far this century, and hopefully ZapThink has been a part of that success. But there’s much more work to do.
As enterprises struggle with middleware-centric, Web Services-based SOA, they eventually move to next generation, RESTful approaches. SOA still calls for an intermediary, but now it’s stateless and exposes functionality via RESTful URIs. The REST-based SOA intermediary is policy-driven and provides a loosely coupled Business Service abstraction, but because it is stateless, it requires a RESTful approach to state that separates application state from resource state.