Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Two different IT industry buzzwords coined in the course of twenty minutes

"Test Driven SOA"..... "Batch Driven SOA"..... not bad going, guys.

RedMonk's sixth PodCast is well worth a listen.

  • The increasing importance of sharing links to good content - and adding a short description. Can't disagree with that.

  • A good discussion of "GreenHat" Consulting's Test Driven SOA concept. They seem rather Tibco-centric but I won't hold it against them...

  • "SOA is the new spelling of CORBA". If you consider SOA only as a technology thought then I guess you could attempt to make this argument. I think there's an increasing acceptance, however, that SOA is something that the business should be interested in

  • "Connectors and agents bad". I'm not so sure... I think they still have their place. For example, there is a particularly sweet spot for connectors when you need to detect events in an application that doesn't know anything about asynchronous messaging or how to make calls out to interested parties. I haven't seen a good way to do this other than with locally-deployed polling connectors. It offends one's sensibilities but it's very often the least worst option.

  • "24/7 running for SOAs", "Batch driven SOA". These are interesting thoughts. At the technical level, one of the goals of an SOA is to hide details of implementation. A potential problem then arises if you can't guarantee that the service implementing the functionality is up all the time... your abstraction has leaked before you've started. There are well-tested patterns for this sort of stuff (asynchronous interactions, the use of an ESB to intermediate, etc) but it comes down to problem of service meta-data (or whatever you choose to call it): as well as documenting an interface, you need to publish its availability, performance characteristics, transaction support, etc, etc - and that should also form part of the contract


All in all, an interesting discussion.

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