Is SOA an Architectural Style?

The term architectural style moved out of the research literature and into the lexicon on practitioners after the Fielding thesis positioned Representational State Transfer (or REST) as the architectural style of the Web. I've always been hesitant to adopt this line of thinking because REST struck me as more of a philosophy -- and a not-quite-accurate description of how the Web works in practice. Now a-days its popular, at least on blogs, to call SOA an architectural style, sometimes coupled with a statement to the effect: Yeah, and we've been doing this for years with [insert your favorite middleware framework here]. I think this misses the point somewhat radically as I'll explain below.

The second related tendency I've seen is the claim that Web services are an instance of this architectural style. I don't think either claim is right, but I'll dispense with the latter first: Web services can be used without reference or respect to any stable model. The beauty of Web services is their use to support SOA, but they can certainly be used for straightforward client server modeling as well. I happen to prefer vanilla HTTP for this kind of interaction, with POX payloads where required (its not just for AJAX), but Web services will work, especially since there is reasonable tooling available to make this pain free for developers.

The problem with the claim that SOA is just an architectural style is that it reduces SOA to an abstract model, when what most people are trying to convey is a new (or at least evolutionary) approach to organizing the data-center. This approach involves, among other things, business-contract driven services, centralized and managed policy enforcement, leveraging ubiquitous Web protocols, process-oriented modeling, etc. Only one of those listed items is technology oriented, but it has clear business benefits as well.

SOA is the tag we wound up with, but perhaps its not so accurate. If I had to come up with something of my own, it would probably be Rationalized Business-Oriented Data Center Organization Amenable to Process Orchestration For Agility and Value. Somehow I don't think RBODCOATPOFAV is going to catch on like wildfire. (But you never know, so if it does, you read it here first!)

But what I want to suggest is that what we're really talking about is a way to better organize software assets to achieve business goals. And this is not what people mean by an architectural style at all. Now you might say this is a chicken or the egg problem. Don't we need to understand the architectural style that supports this before we can talk about serving business needs effectively? In my opinion, the answer is no. I think we will be doing ourselves a tremendous disservice if the SOA tech stack is not driven from the business needs down. The tendency to develop bottom up technologies with the idea that the interests and insights of middleware software folks will solve the needs of business is flawed. We've had a generation of distributed object middleware that suggests as much. And in fact it wasn't even that good for techie solutions.

I'm very interested in qualifying this problem but I think it will take some time to reach a broad consensus among all interested parties. In the meantime, you'll see terms like SOA 2.0 emerging precisely because people are trying to find a way to force the discourse away from the discontinuities that exist today. Long time associates know I have a morbid interest in semiotics: to me, this is an attempt to align an understanding between sign, signifier and signified that does not have stability today. And the quest for clear meaning is a good thing.

Why we need classical music, jazz, literature and poetry

I'm continuously astounded by the human spirit and its ability to express itself even in the face of the worst of evils.

Oracle SOA Fabric

If you didn't have a chance to watch Thomas Kurian's keynote at JavaOne, I would encourage you to do so: it was far and away the most compelling and coherent keynote presentation this year. The three major focal areas were J2EE 1.5, SOA, and Web 2.0 support in our product line and in our donations to open source projects. Most of what Thomas talked about is functionality that is available now, so its a pretty exciting time to be here.

Of course, I am focused on the SOA products, so its nice to see the Fabric infrastructure get prominent billing. The really cool thing about Fabric is that its a best of breed combination of support for service infrastructure, policy management, business activity monitoring, identity based security and event driven architecture that is designed as a fully integrated, common platform: all the essential building blocks of the next generation IT infrastructure. There's not really any other platform offering that can compare. I have a good feeling its going to shortly be the standard SOA infrastructure for many enterprises.

SOA Programming at JavaOne

I'm in the valley for some internal business this week, but I will be talking at the 11am PST JavaOne session tomorrow on SCA and the emerging SOA programming model with Rob High from IBM and my friend Ed Cobb from BEA. Apologies for the late update, but I only recently nailed down the logistics. Stop by afterward to catch up.

Now This Is Cool

I started working in systems programming as a middleware guy writing the low level plumbing in queuing systems aimed at high volume telco applications. I moved on to CORBA (and also started to work with the open source TAO ORB and ACE framework), mostly in C++, with a bit of Java for management infrastructure. After that I worked on building J2EE servers - everything from the Web tier load balancer to EJBs. After that, it was portal, Web services, mobile infrastucture, more transactions, integration frameworks, etc. Almost all the work was the innards. Like ever profession, sofware makes careers a matter of specialization to some degree. For a while I resisted this, but its darn hard to be an effective generalist.

While I've always enjoyed the middleware work, I often struggled with the question of how best to make it useable for non-specialist developers. People who need to implement business logic and Web enable their applications. One of the first times I had to build a real Web application was to show off the work we'd done on one of the first EJB 1.1 containers back in 1999: we had a B2C application (and framework) that we wanted to "port" to use EJB. That's when it really struck home that J2EE didn't really solve the problem for the application developer. Just simple problems like correlating the lifecycle of EJBs to servlets was a nightmare. So I started to write light weight frameworks to tie things together to make it possible for our end user to use J2EE technologies together -- but always felt that was the perspective that the J2EE umbrella specification should have taken from the beginning.

Now we have layers on top of J2EE that make many aspects of the application server more of an SPI: the application server is necessary and important for reliability and consistency of applications, but J2EE is less and less the programming model for end users. The folks that pushed this the furthest and, in my opinion, did the best job were the consultants that developed the Spring framework. At first, I was skeptical at some of what they were doing (treating JTA as a dependable interface without knowing the innards of the application server was a primary concern), but now that the framework has gotten traction, most of the application servers have actually adapted to Spring -- OC4J, for example, is independently certified to interact with Spring correctly. That the "big guys" are bending over backward to accomodate a framework that replaces a big section of J2EE as an API is something I wouldn't have guessed would happen back in, say, 2001. At the end of the day, though, its a great development that really seems to benefit everyone involved.

I've just started to poke around with the new Spring Web Flow framework, which seems to be the right solution at the right time. Managing scopes in Web apps can be a real pain and if this does for state management what Spring does for application logic, score another one for Interface 21 -- and for Java in general.

Nice job.

Oracle SOA suite review

Good coverage and analysis of Oracle's SOA suite, with coverage of BPEL, Web services management, and BAM support: http://it.sys-con.com/read/204725.htm

Pura Vida

I just returned from a family vacation in Costa Rica. Well, actually, I just returned from a business trip in Ireland, but I didn't have time to collect my thoughts on Costa Rica before that. We spent time in two areas: in the vicinity of the fishing town of Quepos, outside of the Manuel Antonio national park and in the area outside of La Fortuna near the Arenal volcano. The former is lowland, coastal, and semi tropical forest land; the latter is referred to as cloud forest as it is a higher elevation and somewhat wetter during the dry season.

Costa Rica has 5% of the world's biodiversity, but what is amazing is the sheer density of the biodiversity in the remaining primary and secondary forests. I was surprised by the amount of land that has been converted to agricultural use: it is extensive. American real estate speculators are omnipresent, so Costa Ricans (referred to as Ticos) are going to have a rough time protecting what natural resources are left. Given the power of the dollar, it does not bode well in my opinion.

The country itself has first world sanitation, education, and health care. There is petty crime, but violent crime seems minimal (outside San Jose). Many of the Ticos I talked with indicated they saw no reason to leave Costa Rica for the US except to visit, as "Life is too good here." The city of La Fortuna, for example, was much nicer than lower income areas in virtually any American cities, with substantially lower costs and a more interesting environment to boot. I was impressed by the pride and intensity of passion that the Ticos have for their ecological system. The guides we had in Quepos -- in particular Vanessa at Iguana Tours -- were infectious in their enthusiasm and had a deep knowledge of wildlife and the supporting ecosystem. Even our taxi drivers carried binoculars and wildlife identification guides. One of them swerved off the road and started to point out birds by their scientific names, providing us with high powered binoculars to observe them ourselves.

Of the two areas I visited, the cloud forest was my favorite, largely because of the staggering diversity of life from the ground floor of the forests to the top of the canopy. We saw everything from armies of ants that literally wore a visible path on the forest floor to three species of monkeys to sloths to poison vipers. Definitely not a vacation to waste laying on the beach. I recommend it as a destination for anyone that wants an experience much like stepping into an episode of the Jeff Corwin Experience.

Business Intelligence on the move

A while ago, I predicted that the next generation of significant IT technology would center aroung business intelligence functions and that BI and BAM products were the launching pad for this development. That is of, course, just the start. Others are now seeing the connection between search and BI that I noted then. In my opinion, Oracle is in a very strong position in this area today, controlling a stack that includes integrated BI and BAM functions across the data tier, middleware and applications stacks. I'm pleased to see that Oracle is moving forward aggressively in both BI and BAM as a core of our Fusion platform and even more interested to see how well that movement is being received by end users. While this is just one of the key differentiators for Oracle's end to end story, I predict it will become increasingly important over the next two to five years.

Back to the future

Yes, the blog has been slow this month. I have several entries that haven't made it past draft mode: just running out of time. I'll try to get some meaningful updates over the next few weeks. Some of what's going on:

Tons of product initiatives are underway right now, including our SOA platform release and forward looking work on the SOA front. In my view, Oracle's platform is second to none in the market right now.

Toward the end of May, I am slated to speak on the Service Component Architecture in Shanghai at ICSE 2006. Topic will be "Next Generation Integration Platforms". I will post the presentation to the blog around that time.

Lastly, I am planning to do an executive program at Wharton this year. I'm very excited about this opportunity to develop new skills and friendships. I'm hoping this will also lead to a nice mix of business oriented and technical posts over time.

WWW2006 Participation

Having seen some very interesting papers in the Web Services and XML Program Committee, this promises to be (another) interesting WWW* conference. I am not sure if I will be able to attend this year as May is looking to be a very busy month. In any case, from the conference chairs:

WWW Conference 2006
Tuesday 23 May - Friday 26 May 2006
Edinburgh International Conference Centre, Edinburgh

Registrations for the 15th International World Wide Web Conference have been going very well. A number of the tutorials sessions are now fully booked and interest in the available accomodation in this busy capital city means some hotels are also booked. If you are intending to come to the conference we recommend you register as soon as possible.

For more information please click here: WWW2006.org.

As well as a really strong refereed paper programme there is a very strong invited speaker programme as well as workshops, tutorials abd developer sessions. Speakers from a varying degree of backgrounds will be present and include:

Tim Berners-Lee - Director of World Wide Web Consortium

David Brown - Chairman of Motorola UK

Mary Ann Davidson - Chief Security Officer, Oracle

Tony Hey - Corporate VP for Technical Computing, Microsoft

David Belanger - Chief Scientist, AT&T Labs

Tim Faircliff - General Manager of digital media business, Reuters

Dave Ingham Blog Discovered

My friend Dave Ingham has moved from Arjuna to Microsoft. They seem to be syphoning up a bunch of folks from Newcastle to Redmond these days. We acquired Arjuna at Bluestone (before in turn being swallowed by HP) and I don't think at the time we realized what a stellar group of persons we were getting. My expectations were that we would leverage their expertise in transactions, but as Dave and Stuart Wheater proved, there was a much broader skill set amongst the team. Dave took over our messaging software and delivered the unfortunately named HPMS (the name was almost as bad as our servlet engine, HPIS) in record time. Looking around, as I see the percentage of the folks from Arjuna now driving companies and technologies, I'm continually amazed.

Dave, best of luck. You can follow his blog from here: http://www.daveingham.com

Waterfall 2006

Now this is one conference you won't want to miss

XML 2005 Proceedings published

Here.

Cross posted to my work blog.

End of an Era

Back in the early 90s when I was still considering a career tangentially related to materials science, I applied to work at a "dream job". At the time, I was hooked on fly fishing and passionate about the inter-mountain West. So it was natural to apply for a job at the RL Winston Rod company, which produced the best "plastic" rods (aka graphite) made as well as some of the finest split cane rods available under the tutelage of master craftsman Glenn Brackett. (I always wanted a Glenn Brackett rod but was never up to the full price. I did live in the Rockies for several years though.)

I wondered as the focus on fly fishing shifted to fast rods and saltwater if the classic rods of Winston would endure. The old IM6 rod (of which I've owned several) with its characteristic soft-tip was hard to beat as a trout fishing instrument. I was pleased to see the saltwater oriented BL5 step up to throwing big flies without feeling like a steel pole.

Many people saw Glenn openly complain about the possibility of outsourcing Winston's low end rods from Twin Bridges to China. Now I'm shocked to hear that the cane rod builders have quit Winston. I presume they will set up an independent shop (Tom Morgan also is building his own line of rods, though the prices are too high for the average fly fisher). If anyone has details on where Glenn and company wind up, drop me a note. I still want mine someday.

Truely the end of an era. With the old guard gone, I doubt we'll see rods of the same touch and feel and quality of the classic Winston into the future; certainly those looking for a rod built under the direction of Mr. Brackett will have to look elsewhere now. Nothing stays the same, but the passing of the Winston rod company I knew still saddens me.

Google, Amazon and Ebay: One of These is Not like the Others

When people talk about the commerce segment of the Internet, there are three names that are almost always dropped: Google, Amazon and Ebay. I'm not sure why Yahoo! doesn't make it in the mix everytime, because its perhaps the most versatile and resilient of the major players in the space. But let's stick with the first three I mentioned to make a point: Google and Amazon have found ways to co-opt the Web to drive their businesses. Specifically, they both offer a model of radical federation by which their services become desireable as ubiquitous building blocks for content providers. This was driven home for me by Adsense. Mostly because I wanted to play around with Adsense, I added it to my blog (Blogger makes this trivial). The first day I noticed I made thirty cents on click-throughs on ads. Now I'm not about to retire off of Adsense, but it serves to illustrate why people stick those Google ads in their blogs: they want a small piece of a very large revenue stream. And if their traffic really picks up, that small piece can be significant, even to a business: its damned hard to sell advertisers on a small Web site. And Google gets driven through the stratosphere by the effects of all this attention. Very nice.

There's something similar happening with Amazon: its trivial now to add a click-through link to a product from any Web site. At least I think its trivial: I'm going to try to experiment with a link to buy my last book. Again, mostly I want to experiment with the Amazon model, but, hey, I can always use a way to help fund my Starbucks habit. And of course while this might help me a little, if lots and lots of Web content providers do the same, its immensely helpful to Amazon. Neat way to grow the business.

All of this brings me to my point: EBay is different. They haven't yet figured out how to achieve radical federation of their services. The thing that bothers me is I don't understand why. It could be with auctions: there's definitely a market for niche auctions that require tighter administration than Ebay can provide. And their are lots of things that EBay won't do for liability reasons. Fine, but that shouldn't stop them from trying for a piece of the action. A couple of good examples.

Wine auctions. Wine sales are huge and Internet wine sales are growing precipitously. There are already wine auction sites. But EBay is missing out on the action. Not good.

Firearms. Whatever you think about guns, its clear that many Americans love their guns and to collectors -- and some hunters -- trading guns is practically a lifestyle. More to the point: its not cheap. Case in point, a single British shotgun can run into the 6 figures. Don't believe me? Check into the costs of a fully engraved Purdy or Holland and Holland. All that trading means an indirect revenue opportunity for an Ebay. As every software ISV knows, indirect revenue is one key to a high margin business.

And its not just auctions. Ebay could drive the next wave of growth on PayPal as the currency of the Web. Or Skype, which remains for now the technical leader in the Internet telephony race. Either could be massively federated as a service that gets sucked into a critical mass of Web sites. The key may not be to drive those technologies into the Ebay auction user base, perhaps its to drive the auction user base into one of those technologies as the next driver.

Don't get me wrong: I love Ebay. I think its a fantastic company with a great service. I use it to find all kinds of things from fishing rods to clothing. But I'm frustrated as hell that they haven't picked up on the fact that radical federation is the key to driving the next wave of growth in the Internet commerce segment. That's what it means to make a "platform play" in the software-as-a-service space: Amazon and Google are moving there aggressively and its a powerful thing indeed.

William Henry blog discovered (and a good idea to boot)

I just discovered (via Eric's blog) that William Henry is blogging. From the looks of things, he's been doing it for a bit -- I'm just slow. William is a great guy, smart and extremely pragmatic. He managed the relationship between HP and IONA when HP was OEMing ORBIX for the application server and was always a pleasure to work with.

The thread on using RSS to provide information about Web services is a good one -- something I've also been interested in for some time. I'd add that its an interesting alternative to WSIL for a lightweight exchange of service metadata.

King Estate Oregon Pinot Gris 2004

Everything I like in an Oregon Pinot Gris and very little of what I despise in your run of the mill Pinot Grigio. This tricky grape is normally my least favorite varietal, typified by sugar water blandness and often yeasty overtones. Many of these Oregon wineries just keep producing outstanding Pinot Gris. The King Estate wine is crisp with citrus overtones that would complement almost any dish, but not overpower subtle foods like shellfish. In fact, I believe I had this wine before with Eric Newcomer, Mark Little and Kevin Connor (what, the always opinionated Kevin has no blog?) at Yabbies Coastal Kitchen at one last years WS-CAF F2F meetings. Eric and I split a shell fish basket and the wine was a great pairing. Recommended, from a confirmed Pinot Grigio hater. And another reason I like Oregon so much.

SOA and the JCP

Some brief thoughts on SOA standards, which do not necessarily reflect Oracle's corporate position. I just read an interview arguing that SOA standards should be developed through the JCP. I just don't get that at all. I don't necessarily have an issue with the JCP being the organization of a private company, rather than a standards body per se. That's not the problem. It's specifically that the JCP doesn't work for SOA by design.

SOA is about integration. That means heterogenous technologies by definition. I don't know how many people have read the JSPA, but its provides the governing rules that make it virtually impossible to do anything that is not part of a Java compatible implementation. And that's exactly what you want in a SOA.

So how to develop SOA standards? There doesn't seem to be a perfect approach, but some combination of open source collaboration and inter-company specification collaboration seems to be a good start. Once there's some open implementation experience, it makes sense to bring the specification of the heterogeneous part to an open standards body both to ratify, clear up any open IP questions, and provide a basis for commercial implementations. Are there better approaches? Does the JCP have a role in one of those contexts? The truth is I don't know. On the first question, the answer may well be yes, and I'd like to hear more ideas. The one thing seems clear, right now the JCP won't be a place where SOA standards are developed from the get-go.

Cross posted from my other blog.

There's No Such Thing As Free Speech

I found that Blogger has a mechanism by which objectionable content can be flagged. This is a huge issue for any open content infrastructure as its just damned hard to keep things from getting out of hand - particularly in a context where children have ready and often unrestricted access to the Internet. Even for adults, its hard to rationalize a strict definition of the patently offensive: and hard to set hard limits on offensive categories. When does satire or humor become offensive? When do political or social viewpoints tilt toward the offensive? These are impossibly difficult questions. The mechanism they've chose is pretty interesting and I guess a nod to the idea that the Web is broadly democratic. It is a bit strange to see Blogger relying on the Wisdom of Crowds (I guess no one ever made them read Gustave Le Bon in college), but as an experiment, it might be interested to see a special list of "delisted" blogs -- if only to gauge the social psychology of the user base.

Back East Your Type Don't Crawl

The DiscoWeb.org Land Rover off-road DVD "Back East" features footage of the Discovery in the New Jersey pinelands. There's a free preview at DiscoWeb.org. You'll have to navigate to the video section since the URL is always the same; under detail, there is a highlight download. Real Media Required.

The video gives a feel for the kind of nasty traps found in the pine barrens. I don't advise going out without a winch.