My thought for today is in German. The “unbearably light” never grow up but repeat their childhood ad infinitum. It’s a playful irony indeed 😉
“Als das Kind Kind war,
ging es mit hängenden Armen,
wollte der Bach sei ein Fluß,
der Fluß sei ein Strom,
und diese Pfütze das Meer.
Als das Kind Kind war,
wußte es nicht, daß es Kind war,
alles war ihm beseelt,
und alle Seelen waren eins.”
– Peter Handke from the screenplay for Wings of Desire
Just read a compelling article from Grady Booch about the perils of believing the hyperbole surrounding Service Oriented Architecture. Personally I think SOA is a great idea but I’m struck by how similiar to the OMG’s CORBA it is and how, in effect, the real evolution is using a arbitrarily firewall traversing port and protocol for messaging. That semi-solved the messaging problem, delegated the security problem and the rest, as they say, is history… Thinking about Steven Vinoski’s comments about a service oriented approach I’m a little dissatisfied. The temptation to want blueprints and cookbooks for all problems is great but there’s a large inherent value in having these. Not to mention the peace of mind that comes with applying an industrially accepted architecture to a thorny issue like service meta-data. I’m too jaded to want to roll my own 🙂
To this end SOA standardisation is being seriously advanced by Steve himself and the other participants in the OpenSOA Collaboration which promises greater standardisation and hopefully industrial acceptance for SOA data layer and service composition technologies. Principally SDO and SCA. The value of service composition and the possibilities for workflow automation are compelling but what as Grady so eloquently puts it, what works so well in the powerpoint sandbox doesn’t yet translate to real world software systems.
My mind is like an old rusty sieve at the moment so I thought the following quotation was apt.
“Blessed are the forgetful; for they get the better even of their blunders..” – Friedrich Nietszche.
I’ve had a few comments over the past few weeks about my whereabouts and the future of Gaisan Technologies. Well, I’ve been working the past few months as a contractor within a WIT campus company focusing on next generation telecoms services (what else ? :)).
I’m happy to say that I’m now working with TSSG most days. Gaisan is still running, still open for business and still doing consulting on telecoms and contract software development. However, there will be many changes over the next few months and I’ll keep you abreast of these on my blog. I guess an interesting opportunity came about and I felt compelled to take it.