More SOA

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Microsoft has a new article (you need it!) concerning SOA (Service Oriented Architecture).

Interesting responses on my Joel On Software post:

Service Oriented Architecture is really a tool more focused on enterprise IT. It's for exposing a companies "business logic" through software. It's not really a concept for applying to a stand alone application like fogbugz or Word or whatever.

Service Oriented Architecture is really a tool more focused on enterprise IT. It's for exposing a companies "business logic" through software. It's not really a concept for applying to a stand alone application like fogbugz or Word or whatever.

If you're a company who has a business such as finance, healthcare etc, you have an IT department who has built custom software which contains your business logic. For many reasons you want to expose that business logic in a generic way so that it can be easily consumed:
1) by other pieces of internal software
2) by external software of your clients
3) by partner companies or companies your might merge with
etc...

And it stands as an important question exactly what type of software one is writing then; I agree that in many organizations SOA (I've worked at gigantic places like Intel and Countrywide and they surely have use for it) is important but I find it hard to believe that it would be as ubiquitous... I'm going to take a back seat and start studying the architecture more and comparing it to the work I've already done and seen in the "enterprise."

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Sun killed Java (Again)

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I was flipping through magazines at Barnes and Nobles and found a reference to an old blog post

He basically says that that Jim Fawcette wrote about Sun and their blunders with Java.Sun created the initiative for C# and the .NET Framework when they sued Microsoft for trying to put extensions in their Java implementation, J++. Otherwise Microsoft was on the path to making Java the de facto standard for development on Windows.

"The Microsoft language team—then under Dennis Gilbert, who negotiated the contract with Sun—was prepared to fully commit to Java as Microsoft's language for development on what was later named .NET. Microsoft would have made Java its main language and competed with IBM and Sun on its framework implementation, according to contacts at Microsoft then and now. Visual Basic would likely have continued, given its installed base, but it would've been marginalized and C# never would've appeared."

Interesting.

I always thought that Sun's major blunder was that they didn't put a full effort behind the development tools/platforms in Java. By doing so they essentially opened the door for Sun, BEA, and all the other companies that produce duplicate facilities for Java, hence fragmenting the market. My thought isn't really original; Cringely alluded to it back in 2001:

"Sun should have maintained its technological lead, but didn't. Why not? Don't they understand that Microsoft is like the Terminator (as depicted in the original film, the really scary one) and will never give up? .NET, whatever that is, is perceived in Redmond as the future of Microsoft, and C# is the heart of .NET. Microsoft will spend whatever it takes, take as many revs as the market requires, for C# to become the dominant programming language in the world. What other high tech company can be described as being willing to behave that way right now? Would Apple, Sun, Oracle, even IBM spend WHATEVER IT TAKES to accomplish ANYTHING?

No, they wouldn't, and that's why they are going to lose, dang it. Microsoft will lie, cheat, steal, or maybe just work very, very hard—whatever it takes. That's the most intimidating realization of all for competitors."

Well, enough beating up on Java. I still think that it was better technology for its time frame. But it wasn't automated, augmented, and unified.

Oh, and if anyone hires me for a J2EE project, who knows, I may change my mind...

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SOA and Avalon (XAML)

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I'm on my way to try and understand what Microsoft and others intend with the so called "Service Oriented" software strategy. Last week I read a whitepaper on SOA and Indigo as well as a short article by Charles Petzold on XAML. I probably won't have many responses to my questions here but I posted on Joel On Software about some frustrations.

I guess my question for Microsoft is "why not a better COM?" The .NET Framework was definitely a step in the right direction, but many of the components one got used to in COM are simply unavailable in the Framework. Instead there is "interop" capability which is much heavier and ineffecient for simple things like SQL DMO and Internet Explorer (SHDocView).

I'll link to comments I find interesting related to these posts.

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Endtroducing. Raîson D'Étre.

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Hello,

My name is David. I live in Sioux Falls, SD as a recent transplant from southern California. I'm a programmer of sorts. "Of sorts" means that right now I'm between many things...

A long time ago I started blogging about technical stuff but it soon became obvious that the people who read my blog were my friends, not my technie cohorts. So things evolved into an open letter which has never ended.

I still like to write about programming, computers, and the technical. I also like the idea of maintaining a technical journal of where I've been and what I've struggled to get past as a programmer.

This blog is about my technical life. Hopefully it will be interesting. Perhaps even, it will become useful.

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