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JBOWS: Just a Bunch of Web Services

Sometimes you know that something is an anti-pattern but you don’t find a good name for it. Last week I discovered the following old blog post about JBOWS. I immediately recognized this as something I had seen before in a lot of so called ‘SOA’ architectures. Unfortunately this anti-pattern still applies today.

JBOWS stands for Just a Bunch of Web Services and indicates a service oriented architecture that focuses on tooling and technology rather than architecture and analysis. Most of the time this happens because IT is leading the SOA initiative(instead of the business).  And SOA with little or no cooperation from the business is meant to fail. Therefore most JBOWS architectures deliver little or no value to the business. If anything, overall business agility will decrease over time as more and more disorganized services spring up with considerably more complex and brittle dependencies that need to be maintained.

So if you recognize this inside your own organization, know that it has a name Glimlach.

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