Comments on: SOA on the Brain

By: People Over Process

People Over Process — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 00:47:12 +0000

ALM and Agile

In talking with James about a presentation around application lifecycle management (ALM), I got to thinking: What really is ALM apart from project management tooling? One of those “is this just a synonym for existing nouns, or a new noun”…

By: James

James — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 11:39:47 +0000

The rails community really should do something about support for SOA as this will be yet another reason why it isn't enterprise class.

Another problem may be that SOA is done in a big way but the problem lies with analyst firms not desiring to tell the story of how customers use SOA for business purposes and instead prefer to talk about products from vendors.

By: Javier Cámara

Javier Cámara — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 11:28:40 +0000

Service Orientation in itself does not bring any real new value than Object Orientation did not offered already. It can be even seen as a variant of it. What has made Service Orientation so popular is actually web services. Web services do provide a novelty that was not available before: real interoperability across any platform, tool and vendor (OK not perfect but the best one ever achieved). Web services is the only realistic technique to build software that can interoperate with any tool from any vendor in any platform. This was never achieved by CORBA, DCOM, RMI or whatever because they did not enjoyed universal vendor support. Web services, SOAP, XML and the like do. And interoperability is the sinequanon requisite for reuse, aka the holy grial of software. Try to reuse C++ in Java: a a joke. "Orientation" is not enough. This huge difference is what has made web services so popular, and then somebody sublimated the thing from the concrete web services into the abstract, generic Service Orientation. Its actual rationale is the interoperability of web services. But in the end this means that [Web] Service Orientation delivers a great deal of real value to IT, and this is why it will govern most of the IT landscape for the upcoming years.

By: Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 06:51:02 +0000

What is it with Oriented – is that some sort of abstract sexual preference on the part of programmers? IT should be Services Based Architecture. And even then Architecture sux. It presupposes that 'architecture' is the be-all and end-all. It may be in the minds of some but I doubt many CIOs would agree.

By: Jason Yip

Jason Yip — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 16:51:30 +0000

I'd say that the purely technical ideas are a distraction. This is unfortunately what tool vendors will focus on.

The most worthwhile aspect of SOA is about effectively supporting business processes that are shared between business units. That requires certain technical approaches but the approaches themselves are not the point of the exercise.

By: Cote'

Cote' — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 16:53:40 +0000

Bill W.: Indeed!

By: Bill Williams

Bill Williams — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 15:08:18 +0000

"Long ago, when I was working at The Cobalt Group as a young J2EE developer" – I didn't think J2EE developers existed long ago

By: Dan Davies Brackett

Dan Davies Brackett — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 20:23:25 +0000

It's really important to (as Coté does) make the distinction between being able to be *part* of a SOA and being "an *implementation* of a SOA". The former is good design; the latter is the inward-facing, technology-centric, millions-of-lines-of-code-behind-the-firewall horror that all of us except Enterprise Architects dislike.

By: Anne

Anne — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 17:28:10 +0000

Interesting musings!

Yes, SOA is largely a technological story but it has a fraternal twin, shared services, that is the business side of the narrative.

As for how service orientation might differ from regular old architecture and programming… I think it's in the coarseness of the components. I'm reviewing a supposedly service-oriented architecture right now that's nothing of the sort, because the "services" are such tiny pieces that they are almost worthless when separated from the rest of the system. This is important when you think of trying to get the suits (shared services) together with the propeller heads (SOA). Shared services business units depend on very coarsely defined services.

By: Cote'

Cote' — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:14:20 +0000

Danno: just plug-in and go is the everyone's dream…so yes
Steve: indeed, I used the example of "Java" and "WebSphere" as over used prefixes. Bill points out an even better example, .Net.
Mark: yes, given how expansive the umbrella of SOA is — that is, how much is gets applied to — that's inevitably right. I have that problem of switching between "what I think the idea should mean" and "what the idea really means" when talking with things, and that quote is an instance of that. I think he problem may be — and this might have been the misstatement on my part — that the technology doesn't exist, collected as something you could point to and say "SOA!" Instead, it can/could be pieced together into what I would call an SOA. But again, I'd also lean towards just calling it "programming" ;>
Bill: you're parenthetical note is correct. And, yes, an enterprise system built without "any" architecture, and even more so, those "30 year-old good software design principles" is terrible.