RE: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed - Best Practices

From
Beack, Theo <>
Date
2006-01-24T20:53:35+00:00
ID
Thread
RE: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed - Best Practices
I wouldn't say that this will be our first deliverable, but 
I certainly be would in favor of creating more structure around the 
adoption blueprints. One option which I think might work well is to use the 
Genrico or SOALogic blueprint and from that start to create the rest of the 
framework, which we can use for subsequent blueprints.

 

Theo

From: Reza Shafii [mailto:] 

Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 15:23
To: Beack, Theo; John 
Harby; ; ; 
; ; Jones, Steve G
Subject: 
RE: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed - Best Practices

Theo,

 

Should our first 
deliverable then be a “Blueprint Adoption Standard Guideline”? Containing 
templates, notation, classification, etc…? I can see a significant amount of 
effort required for this work alone.

 

Cheers,

 

Reza

 

 

 

From: Beack, 
Theo [mailto:] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 3:03 
PM
To: Reza Shafii; John Harby; 
; ; ; 
; Jones, Steve G
Subject: RE: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed - 
Best Practices

 

Reza, 

 

I think during 
yesterday's call and the resulting conversations on the list we 
are exploring several different topics, which I think is related to your 
comments below. I agree that we should have some standard guidelines (+ 
templates, classification system, etc.) which we use for the creation of the 
adoption blueprints. 

 

However, I do not 
think we need a repository of SOA best practices in order to create 
blueprints. In fact I think that the reverse might be true. Best practices might 
start to surface out of the details of the Adoption blueprints (and resulting 
real-world implementations). 

 

It is my experience 
that many best practices would be implementation specific, with resulting code, 
models, technology related implementation information, etc. As an example you 
could have a best practice of how to secure Web Services within an app server 
such as WebLogic. Such a best practice would be very specific to a certain 
vendor product and implementation, which wouldn't fit into the charter of the 
TC. At the same time it might be difficult to replicate or reuse the same 
best practice within another implementation where a different app server is 
being used.

 

I can 
also describe various other examples of quite generic best practices 
that are removed from physical implementation, but before exploring these in 
more detail we should consider the question; what is a best practice? Before we 
can decide whether to include best practices into the TC's work we need to 
define best practice, the role it will play, relationship with adoption 
blueprints, how it will be used and of what value it is to the larger SOA 
community.

 

Theo

 

From: Reza 
Shafii [mailto:] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 
13:47
To: John Harby; 
; Beack, Theo; ; 
; ; Jones, Steve G
Subject: RE: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed - 
Best Practices

Shouldn’t a blueprint 
creation guideline that gives us a common methodology/notation, classification, 
and a repository of best practices (some of which could be just pointers to 
existing best practices) precede the creation of individual 
blueprints?

 

Reza

 

From: John 
Harby [mailto:] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 1:06 
PM
To: 

Subject: Re: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed - 
Best Practices

 

I would be in favor of a repository of best 
practices that are not necessarily tied to a single blueprint but can certainly 
reference one or more blueprints.

On 1/24/06, Beack, Theo <> 
wrote:

If we decide 
to include best practices under the general Adoption Blueprint "umbrella", 
it would be helpful to understand the relationship between the blueprint and 
associated best practices. Immediate questions I have is whether we will create 
"one off" best practices related to a specific blueprint or whether we would try 
to make them generic enough to be used within other blueprints. If that is the 
case, do the best practices deserve to stand on their own and should we create a 
classes of best practices that can be reused within Adoption Blueprints (or even 
separately).

 

Theo

 

From: John 
Harby [mailto:] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 
12:38
To: 
Subject: Re: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed - 
Best Practices

Possibly although I 
think there are loopholes within the charter that would allow us to specify best 
practices. Firstly, the Generico blueprint has some treatment of best practices 
therefore inclusion and advancement of those is included by this 
statement:

  
Circulate, 
  improve, maintain and standardize the existing "Generico" blueprint to be 
  contributed, in the form of a basic Adoption Blueprint. 
  

 

On 1/24/06, Beack, Theo <> wrote: 

Don,

I'm not convinced that we 
agreed on the role or place for best practices
as part of the Blueprints TC. 
I reviewed the charter of this TC
( 
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/soa-blueprints/charter.php) and 
it
made no mention of best practices. Not that I think it is a bad 
idea.
The notion of creating best practices could be of 
value.

However, we need to determine whether this TC will focus it's 
efforts on 
only creating SOA blueprints (+ anti-patterns) or whether best 
practices
will be included in these efforts.

I think one of the 
dangers of trying to focus our efforts on best
practices, is that we might 
enlarge the scope to the extent that it will 
be difficult to focus and get 
some real blueprint work done. It is
definitely a topic worth 
discussing.

Regards
Theo

-----Original 
Message-----
From: Don Flinn [mailto: ]
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2006 
13:57
To: 
Cc:  
Subject: Re: 
[soa-blueprints] To Proceed

Agreed.

In addition, I believe that 
one of the goals that was agreed upon is
developing best practices, 
BP.  These could be partitioned into the
following categories: 

- General BP, which would be applicable to all domains
- Domain Specific 
BP, where the domains might be:
   - Financial
   - 
Manufacturing
   - Retail
   - Professional 
services
   - Business services (not SOA services) 
   
- Media & Marketing
   - Education
   - 
Government

Each of these could be further subdivided, but too fine a 
subdivision,
IMHO, is not in the spirit of a specification.  If we 
could come up with 
best practices at this level we would deliver information 
that would be
useful to a broad category of people.  We could point 
out significant
exceptions or additions for subcategories of the chosen 
domains.
Although the primary effort would be to generalize the BP as much as 

feasible while still making them useful.

Don

On Mon, 
2006-01-23 at 11:49 -0600,  wrote:
> To All,
>
> 
Here is what I gather from the group as a whole: 
>
> 1. Need a 
context on what we are doing.
>     - 2 
cents:  A problem statement would be a great start with
audience, 
etc...
>
> 2. Need to defining use cases to provide context on the 
blueprints 
defined
>      - 2 cents: 
establish a use case document that can be expand on
> this and may have 
domain related spin offs
>
> 3. Need to establish what a blueprint 
is.
>
> I think everyone should start adding to this list and adding 
opinions, 
etc...
>
> This may help to create a bit of focus or 
strategy.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dan
>
--
Don 
Flinn
President, Flint Security LLC
Tel: 781-856-7230
Fax: 
781-631-7693 
e-mail: 
http://flintsecurity.com