Despite lip service from vendors and professional services firms, the SOA architectural approach is still not widely understood, according to Gartner.

Speaking at the Application Development, Integration and Web Services Summit (ADIWS) in Sydney Tuesday, Gartner research vice president Dion Wiggins said many developers have a grasp of the general concept, but implementation-level patterns and tactics are not widely known.

"And, although vendors are working on the problem, SOA still lacks robust support from development tools," Wiggins said.

"SOA is really designed for systems that interact in a loose, coarse-grain manner. For some systems, the application requirements dictate a more tightly coupled interaction."

Gartner believes that another model is needed to bridge this gap and has dubbed it Service Oriented Development of Applications (SODA).