Wednesday, January 07, 2009
MAX Japan
I got confirmation I will be presenting at MAX 2009 in Tokyo, Japan. I LOVE Tokyo!!! This is how excited I am:
Courtesy of RedMonk!
I will be doing a sneak peak of using AS3 on the server side. While this was shown in San Fran and Milan, I want to be able to fully explain how it is done and provide some details on the hybrid server-side code works later on this blog.
I hope I get to teach the Flex/AIR Boot Camp in Japan too. That course always fills up and has good results. If you are going to MAX in Tokyo and want that course, please speak up here (leave a comment) so I can forward to the right people.
Courtesy of RedMonk!
I will be doing a sneak peak of using AS3 on the server side. While this was shown in San Fran and Milan, I want to be able to fully explain how it is done and provide some details on the hybrid server-side code works later on this blog.
I hope I get to teach the Flex/AIR Boot Camp in Japan too. That course always fills up and has good results. If you are going to MAX in Tokyo and want that course, please speak up here (leave a comment) so I can forward to the right people.
Mac XML Schema <-> UML tools. Which is best?
I am needing a tool that can slurp in an XML Schema (W3C format but if it does RNG too that would be killer as I prefer it) and show a UML Class View Diagram of the data model. It must run natively on Mac OS X. I would like a tool that recognizes that UML 2.0 can express a superset of an XML model (contain additional constraints), yet be able to convert from the UML to the XML expression of a given data model and preferably generate any warnings of lost constraints/semantics/cardinality rules etc. I do not want to use XMI if I can help it.
Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Open source preferred!
Duane
Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Open source preferred!
Duane
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
SOA is not dead, but complexity is killing some implementations
I had a number of people send in references and links to various pieces that declare SOA dead. They all seem to be based on an Anne Thomas Manes blog article (which I could not find directly). Before I disagree, I will state I have a lot of respect for Anne as she was one of the few analysts who actually wrote many of the specs discussed in this post and others. Perhaps this is a misunderstanding of semantics? Not sure until I can read it.
Perhaps the semantics problem results from the fact most people still mistakenly think SOA is all about integration. It is not. It is about Architecture, hence the "A" in the acronym. Architecture is not integration, although you can use an architectural description language such as UML to capture the architecture of your integration project. Do you see where I am going with this?
InfoWorld's Paul Krill starts his article with a strange notion:
Now correct me if I am wrong, but SOA is "Service Oriented Architecture". Is Paul implying that architecture that is oriented around services is itself dead, yet the services will exist? This makes no sense as everything has an architecture, whether explicit or not. I also have a lot of respect for Paul Krill and his article was very balanced, exploring some of this.
Services are certainly the mainstay of the new web revolution. Things like SaaS, Mashups and most RIAs depend upon services. I am going to disagree and state that architectures will continue to focus around services as the abstract boundary between needs and capabilities for a long time. In fact, the OASIS SOA Reference Model describes the pattern extremely well and it is durable in that it is not coupled to current technology families like Web Services. SOA is here to last and will last!
Where I can see that there are some aspects dying is the families of technologies that are used to implement SOA have become somewhat passe or too complex. From this standpoint, implementing SOA using the current WS-* stack is a daunting task. This is summed up well in Mark Hansen's "SOA Using Java Web Services". In this book he writes on page 2:
"Am I stupid or are Java Web Services really hard?"
The summary is that, in fact, the WS implementation of SOA fact becoming increasingly complex. Having worked on many of the current standards or just observed their work, things like WS-TX, profiles for Kerberos for WS-Security and the JAXB serialization/deserialization are in fact very advanced technologies and take a lot of forethought. This in turn, will drive many developers to use a REST style SOA approach. Strangely enough, the purported author of SOA's Obituary (Anne), wrote a great blog entry on how NOT to do REST style SOA here.
My conclusion:
SOA is architecture that is focused on services as the abstract action boundary between (business) needs and (business) capabilities. As such, the form of architecture known as SOA that captures that blueprint and relates it to business services is not dead and will survive well into the next decade.
SOA IS NOT DEAD!
Perhaps the semantics problem results from the fact most people still mistakenly think SOA is all about integration. It is not. It is about Architecture, hence the "A" in the acronym. Architecture is not integration, although you can use an architectural description language such as UML to capture the architecture of your integration project. Do you see where I am going with this?
InfoWorld's Paul Krill starts his article with a strange notion:
"SOA is dead but services remain alive, according to a prominent analyst who published an obituary for SOA in a blog post on Monday."
Now correct me if I am wrong, but SOA is "Service Oriented Architecture". Is Paul implying that architecture that is oriented around services is itself dead, yet the services will exist? This makes no sense as everything has an architecture, whether explicit or not. I also have a lot of respect for Paul Krill and his article was very balanced, exploring some of this.
Services are certainly the mainstay of the new web revolution. Things like SaaS, Mashups and most RIAs depend upon services. I am going to disagree and state that architectures will continue to focus around services as the abstract boundary between needs and capabilities for a long time. In fact, the OASIS SOA Reference Model describes the pattern extremely well and it is durable in that it is not coupled to current technology families like Web Services. SOA is here to last and will last!
Where I can see that there are some aspects dying is the families of technologies that are used to implement SOA have become somewhat passe or too complex. From this standpoint, implementing SOA using the current WS-* stack is a daunting task. This is summed up well in Mark Hansen's "SOA Using Java Web Services". In this book he writes on page 2:
"Am I stupid or are Java Web Services really hard?"
The summary is that, in fact, the WS implementation of SOA fact becoming increasingly complex. Having worked on many of the current standards or just observed their work, things like WS-TX, profiles for Kerberos for WS-Security and the JAXB serialization/deserialization are in fact very advanced technologies and take a lot of forethought. This in turn, will drive many developers to use a REST style SOA approach. Strangely enough, the purported author of SOA's Obituary (Anne), wrote a great blog entry on how NOT to do REST style SOA here.
My conclusion:
SOA is architecture that is focused on services as the abstract action boundary between (business) needs and (business) capabilities. As such, the form of architecture known as SOA that captures that blueprint and relates it to business services is not dead and will survive well into the next decade.
SOA IS NOT DEAD!
Friday, January 02, 2009
Happy New Year's!
Trust me - this was a good party! I am off to New York early next week as the grind continues. Flex had a great year in 2008 but this is going to be the year of SOA and BPM as a mainstream "must have". Adobe LiveCycle interest has never been stronger and we are executing on delivering the best ESB for human centric processes.
Predictions:
- more LiveCycle every quarter
- more Flex/AIR/Flash
- Open Screen Project gets in full swing
- more parties like the ones above
Cheers!!
