“Is SOA Dead?” and other links…
Phil Wendley: “Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides ways to group functions around business processes, packaging them as services. This allows for better coordination between services. Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group joins Phil and Scott to discuss whether SOA is dead.” This interview contains one of the few summarizing statements about XML that I agree with… It would be important to mention around my cubicles that the speaker here was the CTO of Systinet because we have a few thousand pounds of application servers from this outfit looming in our enterprise.
“SOA is Dead? It's About Time!”
Kurt Cagle: “Perhaps my biggest reservation about SOA had to be the fact that, at the end of the day, it was still an RPC model that concentrated primarily on calling APIs that differed from one provider to the next. The result of this thinking is the sea of APIs, where there are now tens of thousands of APIs, each of which doing things a little (or in some cases, a lot) differently from one another, with very little cohesion, and with little thought to the semantic complexity that comes when you have that many microlanguages all competing for programmer attention.”
“Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor…”
Martin Fowler: “Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future.”