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   RE: [xml-dev] Re: Major Historical SOA Milestone Today

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Len:

> Possibly the case, but what Joe is after is an effort to clear the
> water. It seems like an honorable effort from here. 

It is an honourable effort....my comments were not a slight against what Joe 
and the standards bodies attempted to do.  It was a comment about the ongoing 
problem of multiple definitions of SOA.

> Facts should change perceptions.  That they sometimes don't speaks to
> the stickiness of acts and the intensions that make one unwilling to
> admit a mistake has been made because then one's intensions are
> perceived as less than perfect.  We insist on perfection from authority
> and that is the most irrational act of all.  So "good intensions and the
> road to hell...".  The quote you make is the defense of irrational
> behavior.  

No, it is not.  The quote I made is a recognition of human falibility and 
reality.  Many technocrats build wonderful monuments to IT architectural 
goodness, and the project fails because they don't take into account the 
messy world of real humans.  UI design is a good example where this is quite 
common.  Building application solutions that are inflexible in the face of 
constant change is another, and funny enough, an area where SOA is intended 
to help out.

IMO, the concepts of SOA are not domain specific, contrary to your opinion,  
since it is an IT-level architectural concept and set of principles.  

So we should be able to agree on some common definition of SOA.  
Unfortunately the politics (another real world messy issue that is 
inescapable) of the different standards bodies and 800-lb vendors are 
typically in conflict and thus I doubt we'll see a common definition in the 
short term.

With luck, maybe the "best" definition will win in the marketplace of ideas 
before organizations get fed up and label "SOA" as yet another failed "magic 
bullet".

Feelin' lucky? ;-)

> Keep in mind, if we apply the rule of the wisdom of crowds,
> we accept the existence of God, UFOs, ghosts, and that Chris deserved to
> be kicked off American Idol.  From the sublime to the silly, crowds
> aren't that discerning.

True enough...and your point is?  

Whether a crowd (how about we call it a "market") is wise or not is 
irrelevant if they label your "product" (ie. "SOA" in this case) hype and 
avoid it like the plague.  You can rail against the market's lack of wisdom 
all you want, while your "product" languishes and dies on the vine.

> The web has a very long and easily discernible habit of insisting on
> simplicity where the dangers of incompleteness are evident.  Companies
> have a long and easily discernible habit of selling more where less is
> sufficient.   The utility of REST vs WS is somewhere between those two
> spaces.  It is probably not one member of that locale, but several in
> combination.
> 
> Two points of view:
> 
> 1) "For every complex problem there is a simple solution and it provably
> doesn't work."
> 
> 2) "For every complex problem there is a set of simple solutions and
> they are the only things that provably work."
> 
> I'd like to believe that companies are honorably disagreeing on
> technical issues, but I note the disparity in stock prices and can't
> help but wonder how much of these debates is just FUD from both sides.

Companies rarely do anything from a sense of honour, including disagreeing.
Another one of those "real world messy" things.

BTW...I subscribe to the 2nd approach for the most part.

> Joe is trying to clear it up.  It is a good idea.

On that we agree wholeheartedly.


Andrzej Jan Taramina
Chaeron Corporation: Enterprise System Solutions
http://www.chaeron.com





 

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