Just finished reading Bob Sutor of WebSphere fame’s take on COA, and the feedback is good. One of the most pleasant byproducts of choosing a Creative Commons license for this publication has been the spike in comments and feedback we’ve received, both public and private. With anyone free to download it, expand on it, or even dismiss it, the model is one that will have to survive on its own merits, but at least is guaranteed not to die on the vine. The feedback from those on the front lines of compliance or SOA issues, in particular, is of particular interest to me as the practitioners are often the best test for whether a model has legs or not.
As for Bob, he’s a guy with a tremendous amount of credibility in both the Web services and SOA worlds, so the fact that he sees some merit to the model is certainly music to my ears. As with other commenters (here, here, here or here), Bob has some suggestions for us as well. I’ll let him say it:
Before I leave the Redmonk paper, I would love to see two things if they do a follow-up. First, a detailed before-and-after IT scenario showing specifically how and where the compliance services are used would be very useful. Second, I believe that the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) will make it easier to do some forms of compliance. This is clearly related to what they are suggesting, but if they agree with me, I would like to see their thoughts on exactly how they think it work.
The before and after is clearly a priority for us; it’s made somewhat challenging by where we are in the SOA adoption curve – not very far – but we’ve got a few prospects there and Geisinger we feel is a pretty good starting point. And I should mention that if anyone reading this feels that they’d be a good example, by all means drop us a line – we’d love to speak with you. As for the ESB notion, all I’ll say is that I conditionally agree (depends on the definiton of ESB, which Bob’s done a good job trying to nail down), and would make for an intriguing follow up. Now, all I need is more time in the day 😉
