Service Oriented Architecture: It's Time to Play Nice With Others!

Mike took us on a pragmatic journey from procedural code, to OOP, to well-designed OOP, to SOA. It was comfortably paced and covered a lot of material in a way that was just deep enough to teach the concept without throwing people in the deep end. I did feel like it ended a little too abruptly—without tying things back together—and could have gone a little deeper into the web services topics, considering the name of the talk. Overall though, I found this enjoyable, engaging, and highly-informative.

The ideas presented were generally right on. The flow of the presentation seemed more to be in a "telling" rather than a "showing" mode, though. I heard a lot of it like "now you want to do this thing, so here's what you do, then you're gonna want to do this thing, here's that..." I think showing some stronger examples of the problems (that SOA solves) would have helped with this.

All that said, I've been to a couple SOA/domain-driven talks in the last year, so it might be that I was looking for less of an introduction/overview and more of a deeper dive into challenges of/approaches to SOA.

A straightforward, pragmatic, well-constructed how-to for SOA. I've been intimidated by the concept in the past because it seemed heavy and complicated, but Mike demonstrated that it can be both simple and practical.

There was a lot of information presented here and a certain degree of abstraction was required. Perhaps too abstract in some places, but definitely resonated with me as I've experienced working my way through multi-thousand-line procedural codebases.

I was planning on skipping out early but I'm glad I didn't. This was my favorite talk this year! Had the most practical applicable advice of any talk I went to, and these are things I plan on looking into and possibly implementing ideas from in the near future!

Well presented, and well designed talk. Mike's a repository of SOA knowledge, there's a lot more I'd like hear from him on this topic. Perhaps a series on SOA? The code samples got a little hard to follow due to formatting constraints, and I would have benefited from a little more, "here's the wins you get from SOA, and here's why this wouldn't have worked out without it." The CLI example was particularly helpful. Sharp, clean looking slides were appreciated as well.

This was very helpful. Some of the concepts later in the talk were tricky. Maybe you could have spent less time on "the bad old days" and a little more time on where MVC and Service Oriented Architecture were different.... and I'm afraid of needles.

Thank you all for the feedback, it is especially helpful as I continue to design and mold this talk and I take each comment to heart and will be utilizing this information to improve this talk for the future. I certainly enjoyed giving this talk and again I cannot state how much this feedback is helpful.

@Jesse - I apologize on the delivery and will work on that for the future. I can see where you felt this way and appreciate you pointing it out. I will certainly bring some more depth to what we are solving on each level. You are also correct in that this talk was more of an introduction on aspects of SOA and DDD than it was on the deeper levels of it. I will look at balancing this more in the future.

This talk was generally a good overview of some SOA architectural concepts, nothing that I was not already familiar with but all valid information. The presentation was fairly heavy on code examples, which I would normally be opposed to but given that this was my first PHP conference I was actually looking forward to some PHP specific implementations of concepts. I agree with other attendees that there could have been more information describing the problems that are being solved, less for my self than for other team members in attendance. Not a bad presentation but not the most compelling session for this conference. I would probably attend another talk by Mike.