Eric Newcomer wrote:
> This whole debate just doesn't make sense to me.
I've been watching this discussion for a while and I'm still not sure
where it's going exactly. There seems to be a disagreement of sorts but
it's not clear to me what it is.
>
> If the goal of SOA is to align business and
> technology, technology by definition plays a role,
> doesn't it?
>
I think that's _a_ goal of SOA, but is it a _shared_ goal of SOA?
Frankly, I doubt it - I see a lot of Vendors defining SOA to suit their
needs to shift product or services or whatever and I see similar biased
behaviour amongst other IT stakeholders. (Eric, please note I'm not
pointing the finger at you)
It seems to be me we have a cross organizational and maybe even a cross
industry issue where we can't agree on exactly what it is we're trying
to do or what we're trying to achieve. i.e. This is a very human issue.
What I am sure of is that:
(1) No single technology or infrastructure is appropriate to all situations.
(2) No single architectural approach or design is appropriate for all
situations.
This is because every organization is different in terms of its internal
processes and systems. And note every organization _wants_ to be
different in order to have an edge over others.
Thus it is not appropriate to talk about a single best technology for
SOA because each point of application will be different. We have wasted
a lot of time pronouncing this or that technology to be _the_ solution
to all problems and that flouts the very nature of design/architecture
which is all about building things that are fit for a specific purpose.
CORBA would be one example, J2EE another, .NET another and Ruby on Rails
will shortly follow the same path I suspect.
> Sure, maybe sometimes the human role is forgotten in
> the debates over which technology is best for SOA, but
> we are talking about software here, and the purpose of
> software is to let people tell computers what to do.
>
> But perhaps I am alone in assuming that technology is
> by definition related to people and what they want to
> accomplish.
>
Sure but I think JP is suggesting that the level and type of technology
used to solve a problem can be widely variable. How many people have
eschewed pencil and paper for drawing on a computer all the time?
My two cents,
Dan.
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