[service-orientated-architecture] Wolfe on SOA 2.0

Mon, 29 May 2006 07:44:31 -0700

This was sent to me in an e-mail newsletter:

(I am sure that you will appreciate his remarks about analysts)
Gervas
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Editor's Note: Version Control

For some of you this may be preaching to the choir—but I know many of
you remember the time when the numbers at the end of a software title
used to mean something.

When Version 1 of Software Suite X graduated to Version 1.3, that
usually indicated that V 1.3 would have a few new features, and more
importantly, a lot less bugs.

But V 2.0—that meant all the 1.0 stuff was now rock-solid, and major
new features were in that release. The numerical release schema was,
of course, a bit of jargon conceived of by engineers.

Now—clearly—the marketers have gotten hold of it, and thus, SOA 2.0
has emerged as the darling new buzzword of companies like Oracle, et
al. and analysts like Gartner Group. The term is meant to describe the
combination of traditional SOA and event-driven architecture, but
already many in the industry hate the idea.

Mark Little, JBoss' Director of Standards and Development Management,
argues there's no need for the term — he understands that people like
to invent terms and see which ones stick. "But for the rest of us
living in the real world, it has no meaning at all," he writes, adding
"Giving an architectural approach a version number is crazy: it makes
no sense at all!"

Then he takes on Gartner's argument that originally, SOA was about
client-server interactions, and SOA 2.0 is about events, and says that
people are confusing implementation with architecture.

"Where does it say that SOA has to be client-server driven? That's a
fairly arbitrary (aka poor) way on which to base architectural
differences: by any strict definition of interaction styles, something
is always a client (sender) and something is always a server
(receiver), but those roles can be transient and change between
invocations," he writes.

IT Analyst Neil Ward-Dutton weighs in on this argument, arguing there
are two kinds of analysts in the world. He believes analysts should
"be good stewards of the influence they have," and do their best to
filter hype and provide practical, independent advice.

The other kind of analyst, he says, "is in this business to make money
by whatever means possible," even when that means promoting ideas that
are fundamentally useless, but sound good, and thereby extracting
money from vendor's marketing budgets, and from doing enterprise
consulting.

"If ever there was a blatant example of the product of this latter
attitude to the IT industry analyst "profession" (I use that term
*very* advisedly) SOA 2.0 is it," he writes.

I'll grant Mr. Little's point that versionizing architecture is
fundamentally dumb. It erodes meaning, and doesn't add much to the
conversation, any more than adding "new and improved," to a detergent
product adds to its purported cleaning power.

Mr. Ward Dutton's broadside at Gartner goes a little further than I'd
like to go, but bears mention, in that to the degree an independent
analyst is seen as being in the pocket of a client also erodes
confidence—especially that of industry professionals, investors and
the media.

What's most dire is that it brings back memories—and I write this
tongue in cheek—of Bubble 1.0, when several prominent analysts went
seriously astray. Confidence plummeted. The Bubble burst. And we all
remember how long it took to crawl out of the morass it left in its wake.

IT thrives when its participants are disciplined, make great products,
and mean what they say. The enterprise needs and wants rock-solid
performance, not another "next big thing" dog-and-pony show. Hype may
be intoxicating, but the hangover is rarely pretty.

Until next week,

Sean Wolfe
Editor, SOA Pipeline
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.SOA-Pipeline.com










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