Opinari

Subscribe

Responses to SOA and the Reality of Reuse  
# Friday, September 29, 2006
 
I've been surprised by the responses I've seen to my latest Opinari. I expected more people to disagree with me, defending the promise of service reuse. What I've seen instead is general (and sometimes enthusiastic) agreement. Even the comments on Joe McKendrick's ZDNet entry were largely in agreement, although I'm not sure Joe himself shares my perspective.

Microsoft's Harry Pierson wrote an interesting response on the importance of context in reuse, something I fully agree with. His observation that reuse with services might well be more difficult to achieve than it was with objects also rings true, since the requirement for remote access to services does raise the bar. David Ing also wrote a useful response, raising some excellent points about why reuse is valuable primarily for services that expose data.

For a view from the other side, I had a chance to talk recently with the author Thomas Erl. We both presented at Gartner's Application Development Summit this week, and Thomas is significantly more bullish on the potential for reuse. As I understand it, his view (based on experience gained from his firm's consulting work) is that if an organization does an appropriate top-down analysis of a well-defined business domain, it's quite possible to discover and implement reusable services. This is a good argument, and I'm willing to believe that there are cases where this kind of analysis-led reuse can work.

What's harder for me to believe is that a majority of organizations will be able to do this. Instead, I've come to expect most efforts to take a more technically oriented bottom-up approach. Given that the coming wave of vendor platforms will all but force us to build service-oriented applications, it will be hard to avoid at least this much SOA.

Will this simpler, less ambitious approach offer all of the benefits claimed for SOA? Certainly not. But is it an improvement over the world we live in today? Just as certainly, the answer is yes. Like objects, services won't provide everything promised by their most fervent exponents. Nonetheless, this shift counts as a step forward.

3 comments :: Post a Comment

 

Introducing Windows Presentation Foundation  
# Monday, September 18, 2006
 
The last of the series of papers I wrote for Microsoft on the .NET Framework 3.0 has finally been published: Introducing Windows Presentation Foundation.

I don't have much history in the GUI world--my career has been largely server-focused--so when Microsoft asked me to write about WPF as part of this series, I was willing but not especially excited. After writing the paper, though, I'm worried that I may have wasted much of my working life. This GUI stuff is really, really interesting, and the paper was fascinating to write. In a service-oriented world, one might also argue that the kind of client software WPF allows will get even more important. Whatever happens, it's clear that this new foundation for user interfaces will matter significantly to most people who write or use Windows software.

In other words, WPF is about to impact you and a few hundred million of your fellow human beings. Get ready.

0 comments :: Post a Comment

 

Understanding Workflow in Windows SharePoint Services and the 2007 Microsoft Office System  
# Saturday, September 02, 2006
 
Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is destined to be part of many Windows applications. Arguably the first really important example of using WF in software from Microsoft is the workflow support in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Focused on human workflow, the goal is to provide a platform for both application developers and less technical people to create workflow-based applications that run on SharePoint.

To add to this, the 2007 Microsoft Office System includes Office SharePoint Server 2007. Building on the workflow support in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, this server adds things such as pre-defined workflows for common scenarios (e.g., approving a document) and the ability to interact with workflows using Office 2007 clients.

All of this has plenty of moving parts: WF, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Office SharePoint Server 2007, Visual Studio, the WF Workflow Designer, a new tool called Office SharePoint Designer, and more. I've written a Microsoft-sponsored white paper, available here, that gives a big-picture view of this new set of technology. If you're interested in Microsoft's approach to human workflow, you might find this paper interesting.

3 comments :: Post a Comment