Guerrilla SOA is to BDUF as the Internet is to...

Joe McKendrick's post on guerrilla SOA services describes services arising as islands or neighborhoods. Both are nice analogies.

But what does EA even mean in a world of guerrilla SOA? Extending the neighborhood analogy, do you have to burn everything down occasionally in order to get a coherent system? I'm thinking specifically of the experience of navigating my hometown Chicago's post-fire grid system vs. Boston's decentralized and unplanned road system.

Still, I find the guerrilla SOA concept rather compelling. What I like about this approach is:

• It doesn't require perfection up front
  
• Keeps the focus on the business
  
• Abstracts the type system (WSDL) out to a format that can change without breaking clients. The Soya project would be a concrete example of this message-oriented format.