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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Re: Major Historical SOA Milestone Today
 I completely agree. My only quibble is that on my desk as I write are RFPs at levels of technical complexity that are not appropriate for the process of the procurement. We have to answer these in very precise detail even where that detail makes little difference to the purchaser. It makes the IT staff feel better and in rare cases, it makes their jobs easier. However, if the IT staff were a bit more involved, they could settle these issues before the paper goes to press. I don't know what your business model does, but ours has a very long procurement cycle and requires guys like me to analyze RFPs down to the last field. It slows us down. Too many people assume they are selling to guys and gals just like our selves. That is actually very rare in big systems sales. That is where the Sun's of the world lost it. Multi-core servers, Java, are just stuff. Yadda yadda. That approach to the computer systems business is a recipe for $4 a share stock. Very few industrial software/hardware systems are shrink wrap. When you get into multi-million dollar sales, the process is anything but easy. Will SOA make it easier? One can only hope. len -----Original Message----- From: Greg Hunt [mailto:greg@f...] Len, I think that the interesting thing about SOA is the extent to which it will drive modelling approaches to services. The focus on the specific technologies is an unfortunate distraction (and I agree with Michael Kay that it looks awfully like things that we have already done). Many businesses are already able to be conceptualised as sets of outward and inward facing services, its the inconsistent modelling at the business semantic and operational level that prevents me from easily sending a purchase order to partner agencies or companies. This inconsistency is a fact of life. If you are a supplier to a $20Bn retailer, you do what they want. If you deal with two of them, you probably do two different things. Its how that problem is managed that will determine success or failure of the broader aims of the SOA movement. I don't agree that the business guys wanting to know "how we do it" is exactly what slows things down. What they usually really want to know is "what are the business visible side-effects?" and "how does it break?". Today that tends to mean knowing whats inside the box. How do we model services so that the business can understand side-effects and breakage easily without the conversation about the box content? How do we standardise knowledge of those things? What I hope to see come from all this SOA stuff is approaches to the definition of vocabularies (how they relate to stylistic, semantic and change management issues) , the evolution and diffusion through the industry of commonly understood interaction styles, and some answer to the question at the bottom of it all, how do you define service interfaces that are maximally useful and maximally flexible. It is this understanding, if we get there, that will pay off. Otherwise it all tends to look like a cooler, more recent version of [CORBA|DCOM|APPC|RPC|Punch Card Bills] in a less resource constrained environment. The initial, top-level definitions are a long way from addressing these issues. The XML space and the SOA spaces both seem to be where the relational database space was in the 80s, disconnected technologies, limited practitioner understanding, some odd implementations and improving but not-there-yet tool support (for the not quite there yet WS-* stuff that we need to enable handling of financial value transactions), all combined with a high level of enthusiasm. Practitioners in general are still struggling to arrive at a concensus on how to do things and still struggling with some odd ideas about how things work. What I believe happened in the RDB space was that the knowledge diffused through the industry, the tools got better, organisations internalised the knowledge, and database modelling is less of a trauma (at the less-demanding end at least) than it was. I hope we go the same way with services. 
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