Tech Ed 2005 Resume
All good things must come to an end.
A real eye opener was the Chalk & Talk session by Clemens and Steve. During this session they tried to answer the question “Does SOA really exist?”. Since none of the Service Orientation tenets speak about architecture the abbreviation should be changed to SO/A. Yesterday I noticed that Christian used separate messages namely AddRestaurantRequest, AddRestaurantResponse, RateRestaurantResponse in one of his examples. I heard Clemens earlier this week saying that an operation should have exactly one in-message and optionally one out-message. OK but composing messages inferred from arguments for each operation in your service contract isn’t that much different from using arguments in an envelope. I haven’t heard any speaker about the different types of messages (Command Message or Document Message) nor message format (Canonical Data Model). This led to an exchange of ideas on messages afterwards with Alex and Frans. I introduced them to an industry standard B2MML to integrate business systems such as ERP and supply chain management systems with manufacturing systems such as control systems and manufacturing execution systems.
Anyways, after a good night’s sleep I conclude:
It is still a long way to message oriented systems (services). Indigo indeed rocks hard to build, with the knowledge we have today, connected systems based on message oriented principles. We have the tools today to build working systems on the current ASMX & WSE-* stack but these systems aren’t necessarily message oriented. The SO/A spokesmen still have a couple of gaps to fill. A professional developer should attend to Tech Ed (-like) events at least once a year.
“properly” Connected Systems are the future!
This is a great environment to exchange ideas and to meet and talk to interesting people. To all the people I have met, thanks for contributing to a great atmosphere and highly motivating discussions!