The Madness of Layered Architecture. I once visited a team that had fifteen layers in their code.
That is: If you wanted to display some data in the database in a web page, that data passed through 15 classes in the application. What did these layers do? Oh, nothing much. They just copied data from one object to the next. 10 Object Oriented Design Principles Java Programmer should know. APIs: A new path to SOA. Long ago, enterprise companies started using software to manage information across the enterprise.
As the number of systems within the enterprise grew, the need to synchronize all these isolated systems emerged. From this came the need to find a solution allowing system-to-system communication, and the easiest approach for this was point-to-point integration. Soon, enterprises found themselves with several systems interconnected via point-to-point integration, resulting in a maintenance nightmare. Rather than being unified, each system had it’s own communication protocol – some were file based, others were databases, and if we were lucky, some of them used web services.