All anyone's supposed to be thinking about in IT at the moment is how to adopt a service-oriented architecture, and how to prove that they have.  Of course, the problem is that no-one can agree on what exactly a service-oriented architecture is, and to the extent that they can, their vision of it is rather trivial.  In this series of posts, I'm going to propose a way of understanding service-oriented architecture that explains why it is important in a wide variety of contexts.  And when I'm done doing that, I'm going to become quite adamant that queues aren't services for a whole bunch of reasons that most people should agree with.  'Cause I'm really quite sick and tired of hearing that a queue-based architecture can be a service-oriented architecture.  That's true only if we suck all of the significance out of the term, “service-oriented architecture.”