Murls wrote an interesting comment on my last post about Dr. Don Fergusons presentation at the last architect council.
Murls writes " .... To me it seems like I have seen so much come and go over the years and SOA seems to have come and gone faster than a $50 hooker. And my belief is confirmed through a set of slides that are just as relevant as the hooker. Here is an interesting thought...
(Q) what is the difference between the human body and the IT Industry?
(A) We know whats going on inside the human body. And we didnt create it!
Not sure if I'm intimate enough with the subject matter to comment on the $50 hooker analogy ;->
Certainly I agree, as would anyone who has been in the (IT) industry for some time, that we have seen our fair share of fads … waves of supposed innovation that have washed away without fulfilling the early promises. I too, am starting to tire of everything being “SOA” but there is still some interesting stuff going on, some of which Don outlined in his talk (along with the visual cues from his slides). i.e. I thought his talk was more engaging than just his slides :-)
One of the interesting topics he talked to folks about was some early work going on at BizTalk Labs. This includes some discussion on the Internet Service Bus (okay I can do without that name too).
The aim of the project is to offer some of the services of a services bus (connection between end points, publish-subscribe) on the internet as a software service. The channel 9 video on the topic describes a scenario of an IRC chat program where clients can subscribe to an IRC channel (the IRC chat scenario starts at about 10 minutes into the video). A second scenario based on a Wall Street trading app (at about 16 minutes into the video) aims to highlight de-coupling the end points and connect via the service bus.
Early days, but the potential for this is interesting to contemplate and something that would have seemed some way off 5 or more years ago. We have come along way with web services et al (and some service orientation techniques).
Back to the question that Murls asked us to consider ..... I think the question and answer could be:
(Q) what is the difference between the human body and the IT industry?
(A) We don't know what's going on inside the IT firewall of most complex organisations and we did create it! Is SOA an attempt to help us simplify and understand some of this complexity?
