Designing Service Oriented systems just got easier!
[Updated 2006-08-02 with correct links]
When discussing how to design and build Service Oriented systems, one of the most enduring questions I've heard is "how do I design a Service Oriented system?" The actual meaning behind this question ranges from requests for help on how to approach the process of "thinking Service-Oriented", but more often the question often boils down to "how do I plan, design, layout and operate a SO system?"
The answer often depended heavily on what methodologies the questioner uses to design systems today. While many of today's design tools and methodologies can be applied to solving this problem, they are often overly complex and require significant skill and the training and practice that results in that skill) to render the resulting design document with sufficient accuracy and clarity to enable an independent consumer of that document to implement the given system successfully.
The difficulty in rendering sufficiently accurate designs using today's largely textual) methods has given rise to several Domain Specific Languages – ways of describing a design in a language that is (largely) unambiguous and broadly reproducible.
Several years ago, Microsoft started down the path of designing such DSL's as part of the overall Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI). The core goals of DSI are essentially help simplify the design and operation of today's complex distributed systems far more effectively than ever before. DSI aims to provide a suite of DSL's that help us specifically describe what a system should do, how it should be composed and structured, how parts of the system communicate and relate to one another and what policies govern the operation of such a system.
I am extremely excited to see the release of the Service Modeling Language (SML) specification. SML is the result of the combined work of Microsoft, IBM, Sun, BEA, BMC, Cisco, Intel, HP Dell and EMC and is destined to be used to "used to model complex IT services and systems, including their structure, constraints, policies, and best practices".
Now, of course, design tools will help render such DSL's in a comprehensible manner - converting pointy-brackets to diagrams that mere humans can understand and I for one can't wait to see support for SML and other related DSL's being built into powerful tools by Microsoft and others.
