I love the quote from Jim. Waldo's always been one of the guys that really grok this space. I met him when his team first created RMI.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm playing both sides of the SOA fence. On one hand, I'm using the lack of understanding to open up new opportunities for my business, but on the other hand, I'm concerned that the industry is setting up another house of cards that could collapse. After all, what the heck is anyone really getting when they do SOA that they couldn't get before with CORBA or even EDI? The ONLY real difference that we can apply here is the use of standards based on ubiquitous Internet protocols, which means, that in order for SOA to deliver where EDI and CORBA failed, it must be ALL about Web Services and the Web Services protocol stack. This then forces us to admit that SOA is the architectural framework for deploying and managing Web Services since the Web Services standards already tell us how to build a service. Please do not read this as JP is saying that SOA is synonymous with Web Services. I'm just a logician following a basic line of reasoning that the industry has laid out. However, for me, SOA is all about the deployment and management of services, which is something that was sorely lacking from all the prior distributed computing environments. Anyone remember CORBA's biggest flaw? You couldn't look up your or register your CORBA object into any implementation of the CORBA Naming Service. As Waldo said, reusability is something we continually strive for whenever we develop software. So it doesn't differentiate SOA from past DC approaches. The concept of a service is a crock. I've been trying to expand a section of a training course on Selling SOA for vendors called 'Thinking in Services'. I have about 6 or 7 slides, and that's the extent of what's required to think in terms of services. So, they ain't that complex. So services don't differentiate SOA. Semantics don't differentiate SOA, because we got semantics from EAI and other integration practices. Hence, the only clear differentiator of SOA from everything else that came before it is XML and Web Services. That's my theory! Please, pick it apart as you wish. JP ------------------------------------ Avorcor, Inc. JP Morgenthal Managing Partner [EMAIL PROTECTED] 12110 Sunset Hills Road, Suite 450 Reston, VA 20190 tel: (703) 648-1520 fax: (703) 648-1523 mobile: (703) 554-5301 ------------------------------------ -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jan Algermissen Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2005 2:29 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [service-orientated-architecture] Re: What is a Service? What is an Application? On Oct 30, 2005, at 5:35 PM, Anne Thomas Manes wrote: > From my perspective (and I realize that lots of people disagree > with me on this point), the essential concept in SOA is reusability. Since SOA does *not* do away with the coupling between type and interface that distribution architectuires such as CORBA and RMI inherited from their OO roots, I feel we should ask the question: What is it then that makes SOA different from any other OO-style distribution architecture? And how is this beneficial for building distributed systems? The only thing that I can really see is, like Anne said, reusability (having communication peers agree on service (and thus interface) semantics up front while keeping a focus on maximizing the number of other peers that could make use of these service semantics. Jan P.S. Something else comes to mind (IIRC Jim Waldo made this funny point in a recent talk): "the essential concept in SOA is reusability".....do you remember functions? modules? objects? components? Wasn't reusability the essential concept of any one of them? Oh my..... ________________________________________________________________________ _______________ Jan Algermissen, Consultant & Programmer http://jalgermissen.com Tugboat Consulting, 'Applying Web technology to enterprise IT' http://www.tugboat.de Yahoo! Groups Links ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get Bzzzy! (real tools to help you find a job). Welcome to the Sweet Life. http://us.click.yahoo.com/A77XvD/vlQLAA/TtwFAA/NhFolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
