William Henry wrote:
> Truly remarkable Gregg. Your zeal is commendable. Your argument is
> very valuable and worth debating.
I probably have a different, more restricted view of distributed computing than
many, so your caution may be necessary in running this road with me. However,
I
still fail to see where WS- technologies have made anything simpler, smaller or
easier.
> You say: it's all there today. There are many that would say that it
> was all there with CORBA. Many SOA implementations using CORBA are
> out there. And that was governed by a very large consortium and not a
> single vendor. And wasn't limited to one language either. But many of
> us that deployed CORBA wouldn't and don't force CORBA on people
> today! It's but one of many useful technologies out there for
> implementing services.
>
> Why CORBA didn't remain the standard used in SOA can be put down to
> several factors. We've all heard many over there years. I only bring
> this up because I think it is important o understand from your Java-
> has-all perspective.
I'm not saying "Java has all". I'm saying Java does distributed computing with
all the necessary support for that application domain, today. That is why it
is
a good choice, in my opinion. It certainly is not optimal for all
applications,
but, to me, that is an API complexity/scaling issue similar to the
complex/scalable SOA arguments we have here.
> 1) Microsoft wasn't involved - Microsoft being a large participant in
> the enterprise meant their exclusion from the OMG and CORBA left many
> doubting whether CORBA could be a complete standard. Having to bridge
> from COM to CORBA and CORBA to COM seemed unnatural. (products like
> COMet did this). Microsoft being involved in the WS- community helps
> in many ways to ease the markets worries that WS- might fail. Mind
> you it doesn't stop some of the in-fighting ;-) What's interesting
> from the Java perspective is that Microsoft went the C# route. Hence
> in this way Java is not unlike CORBA. (Also see notes below about
> platform control)
Microsoft wants noone else to have and advantage on their OS, besides
themselves, plain and simple. They continue to buy up competitors, standardize
by asimilation and otherwise run over anything that is ahead of them, by
suggesting a completely different standard. Everyone buying into it is
contributing to the slowdown of innovation, plain and simple!
> There are
> so many political and commercial battles going on that the standards
> bodies are playing right into ... well right into arguments similar
> to your own .... like Java is the cure for cancer and world peace :-)
I have never uttered such phrases, and I'm sorry that the perception is so
twisted to drive this kind of commentary.
In other forums I've commented about how much time the software industry
continues to waste to reimplement the same solutions in new platforms/languages
for decade after decade. We've completely failed to address user interface
issues because we'd rather redesign something in a new language/platform.
I've been doing software since the early 1980's and have seen a wide range of
this phenomena. The VB programmer types and Power Builder Types want to do
simple applications quickly. The portability of such applications is almost
never a consideration. The ability of these applications to deal with a
distibuted computing environment is a big issue.
I'm tired of having to port applications from platform to platform and
reimplement software in different languages everytime I move from machine to
machine or OS to OS.
Java's cross OS portability and its inherit distributed systems support make
software development in the network world a lot easier to get right.
> I think
> this causes paralysis for those implementing SOA. We all need to tell
> the market to START SMALL!!! (even if you're big). What's interesting
> about this from your (Java) arguments perspective is that Java has
> become VERY complicated too.
This, I think is a great indication of what parts of Java people are using. To
say that Java has become VERY complicated is a nonsense comment to me. What
part of Java has become VERY complication?
Are you a J2EE user? A J2ME user? What about J2SE? What about J2SE 1.5
language
features, are those complicating your life?
I have never, ever, written a J2EE application. I've written Servlets, and use
them still, but in a small servlet container, Jetty, deployed as a Jini service.
I built my own broker in 1998, before JMS and J2EE existed, and that is the
foundation of our companies "ESB" that we use for integration and data routing
between services. I haven't had to change that container for the past 5-6
years. It continues to provide a light weight pubsub container that makes it
easy to write small object to go inside of it to create customer routing and
management solutions.
My toolset is different than yours. That probably causes my view of Java to be
different from yours :-)
> I think System Integrators (SI) play a big role in popularity of
> products which then has effect on standards. Where can they make
> money? Moving to a new standard might mean that they can rebuild what
> they just built in five years in the "new and improved" technology.
>
> I think that analysts need something new and fresh to say to their
> clients and the market. No use saying "hey what you used last year is
> just great! Keep using it. We have nothing new to say" And so the
> analyst feeds into the cycle ... which often becomes recycle. (No
> offense to Anne et al .. it's just the nature of the business ...
> they also try to keep vendors honest).
The folks buying into this machinery are what's driving and supporting its
existence. If it wasn't profitable, it wouldn't exist. The vendors
continually
change things and continually out pace your knowledge and that makes you feel,
if not actually be, dependent on their expertise.
> Quite a cynical view perhaps but that my observation. And it does
> generate innovation. No doubt about that. But there is a lot of
> recycle and "emperor's new clothes" factors involved too.
The innovation happens in the small places of the machine, not in the large.
Supporting the big companies and the standards is useful for many. But, it has
a pretty huge price from the perspective that you have to continually change to
keep pace with the vendors. They are in control, and you're just along for the
ride.
With Java, I feel I'm in more control. Sun is a good citizen about trying to
maintain backward compatibility these days. They learned their lessons the
hard
ware in the 1.2 and 1.3 days.
> But I reiterate what I said to you earlier: there is no J in SOA.
> Sure you can wrap everything Java. Bt many of us don't want to, and
> won't and feel we have very good reasons for not wanting too. Most
> importantly why force Java in an environment that doesn't need it.
> Take for instance COBOL application in a CICS environment. Why not
> just Web service enable them naturally rather than forcing Java and a
> JVM on front??
I guess your view of what is possible vs mine is different. Do you know about,
and undertand the power of mobile code for distributed client user interfaces?
Do you understand the problem that this solves in an environment where more
than
2 people are using the software?
Do you understand the importantence and power of application security that is
beyond "on" and "off" that tunneling based security schemes such as HTTP
security provides?
> BTW I like Java and have been using it for about 10 years. I just
> don't see it as the gateway to everything.
It is the gateway to making networked, distributed computing a lot easier, and
more effective. Again, the power of Java is realized by taking advantage of
mobile code.
If you're not able to grasp that possiblities, or don't have time to explore
them, then you'll probably not see anything in my "raving" responses to some of
these threads.
In the end, all programming platforms can probably recreate most of the power
of
the Java platform through various mechanism, and can recreate the features for
combating the 8 fallacies of distributed computing. But, the languages inbuilt
security features and its association with mobile code really is the pinnacle
feature combination from my perspective.
If you don't "get it", my "ravings" will go in one ear and out the other and
leave with a rather comical view of my posting.
If I can't make you see the issues, then perhaps I can at least give you a
laugh
for the day :-)
Gregg Wonderly
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