Our Service Oriented Architecture team is writing very next-level things, such as JSON services that pass data like this:

<JSON>
<Data>
...
</Data>
</JSON>

5 years ago, I spent two days in a conference room championing a service oriented architecture, which we had started down the path a year before. The other guy wanted to undo what was done and take the monolith approach. Not making any progress, I walked away and decided to let him have his way. A year later I left the position and quit programming. That whole experience played a major role in the decision to just give it up.

The CEO just made a huge huge push-over to the developers.

He doesn't have any customers/clients and wants us to push our limits to make a Service Oriented Architecture where legacy code is needed to be revived, no documentation, and a single motherfucking mobile developer who has 3 projects already in his 1st month of stay.

So today I got to see one of the most stupid architectural choices I have ever seen.

They have a service-oriented architecture. Mainly Python and Elixir.
A lot of computation goes in the Python services.

And the Elixir services as used to expose RestApi. Basic ones, basically DB proxies.

Not a lot of async, or communication... Just plain CRUD.

Why the fuck do you use Elixir for that?? And now they can't recruit someone... And the CTO doesn't get why it was a stupid choice!!!

And in python, they use async functions with sync DB APIs...

So. Question: is service-oriented architecture a web/network "thing" or would it take actually be of some benefit to an installed app?

I ask because we build on a framework that, for the most part, has pretty good interfaces and is specific on how things need to be implemented in order to work. However there are (g)rumblings within sad frameworks working group that they are going to switch over to "Service-oriented Architecture" which to me just sound buzzwordy. We are an installed desktop app.

I've just finshed a cours about service-oriented architecture in my uni and a lot of people are "complaining" about SOA becasue it's not used so much these days and it's a waste of time to learn it. What's your take on this? Do you use or have SOA in your company or use it in some way? Any rants about stuff you learned in school that were completely outdated? A friends friend finished uni about two years ago and they had a big course in Flash...