SOA
Service-Oriented Architecture, perhaps the most popular TLA of the past decade. Also, it's an architecture that can go wrong if it's implemented naively...
In Part 1, I introduced Thomas Erl's notion of adopting the reusability analysis practices of ISVs when modeling reusable services. Today we look at what this entails. First, let's take a look at what happens to software that's supposed to be reusable if you do *not* perform reusability analysis. When my employer was launching its first enterprise product a few years ago, we allowed our first few customers to dictate the details of many features. This practice had a certain logic to it: we needed...
Thomas Erl insists in his magnum opus, SOA Principles of Service Design, that you do not need to goldplate a service's capabilities, or consult with Madame Zelda and her crystal ball, to make the service reusable for future consumers and compositions. Certain types of software that we have been using for decades--operating systems, business productivity software, almost anything an ISV produces--have benefited from a lot of up-front analysis of reusable capabilities. If your software is being used...
Services, designed right, have much more runtime autonomy than components. That autonomy gives you much more ability to manage the security, reliability, and reusability of the encapsulated logic, although there can be a small cost in system performance. And service autonomy makes changes quicker and easier. That ability can save your bacon from time to time, just like it did for me one morning when I got to work....
Long Island Expressway...painless dentistry...dry wine...educational television. Inventing oxymorons like these is a wonderful party game; what others can we come up with today? How about: airline food...random order...House Ethics Committee...Service-oriented business intelligence....
That last phrase does seem like an oxymoron, at first glance. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Intelligence (BI) appear to be very different animals in enterprise architecture....
As I wa
Recently I discovered a tool that I had needed for a long time. Fiddler, a freeware product created and supported by Microsoftie Eric Lawson, can be used to debug HTTP traffic from any web browser (or client application). Here's how you can use it:
1. View/Analyze HTTP traffic....
2. Generate test scripts....
Robin Harris just posted a near-heresy on his ZDNet blog: he thinks that SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) is overhyped, and will die a painful death as businesses discover the difficulties in monetizing it and making it reliable. Come on now--hype, in our industry? Please! Actually...I agree that we are indeed well into a hype cycle regarding web services, and we would do well to make sure that SOA doesn't become the next "Golden Hammer." This is a term coined by Brown, Malveau et al. in their...