01/26/09 :: [SOA] In defense of SOA standards bodies... [permalink]
Duane Nickull and Joe McKendrick responded to my post on the SOA Soup. Thanks but no thanks. One of the comments from Alexis reminded them that maybe, just maybe, they could at least look at SAE and Praxeme. Couldn't Duane (and Joe) ask themselves this simple question: how come such small groups of people produce work that is vastly more superior to the one of the mighty vendors' representatives, with the structures and processes of organizations like the OMG and OASIS? Ah... I almost forgot, Alexis, Duane is "the" TechnOracle, he does not ask questions, he has only answers.
Do they even care to look? Could they compare the petty work of SOA-RM, SOA-RA and SoaML with these two pieces of work? No, I forgot, they don't look, they defend their crappy work. How crappy? Let's take versioning for instance. Miraculously SOA-RA talks about versioning. For Duane's working group, versioning is an "Architectural Implication", the "implication" is that we need:
mechanisms to support the storage, referencing, and access to normative definitions of one or more versioning schemes that may be applied to identify different aggregations of descriptive information, where the different schemes may be versions of a versioning scheme itself;
Boy, aren't we glad that this committee is not designing airplanes. Joe, reading behind this arcane language, you see that they don't even think of runtime "compatibility" -a major architectural implication, no what they have in mind is "source control style versioning", at design time. Do you think they would actually reference the work of Dave Orchard on the topic? Here is a guy who spend a good chunk of his career building one of the most critical piece of SOA, by himself in the shadow of this machinery. A Forwards Compatible versioning scheme is the most essential element of SOA, this is what makes SOA different, never before, the software industry had such a capability. Wouldn't you think that such a foundational piece would deserve at least a link to Dave's work (say as an example of a versioning scheme?). Noooo....
SOAML has zero reference to Service Versioning or Version. You mean Version is not even an attribute of a Service Description? Joe, what is there to defend? Please tell us. Read the spec.
Let's take another example, just as foundational. The relationship between an Enterprise Information Model and Message Types. How are these two specs treating again such a foundational problem? They hand wave. They don't care. Way above their heads. When will those bozos stop wasting our time with these "specs to nowhere"?
And I can continue on and on and on. Joe, how come it took until June 2007 to complete the WS-* stack? Don't you think we could have done that earlier? How come a spec as innovative as WS-CAF was killed on the vendors' politic altar to be replaced by something vastly inferior (WS-TX), designed by a couple of big vendors and handed out for signature at OASIS? Why has WS-I made bidirectional contracts an outcast of SOA?
Both SAE and Praxeme are not vendor driven... their goal is not to bake a product or somebody's career or pet project into the standard, it is to actually produce something that can be used by everyone. Duh...
I feel sorry to have to write this that way, but these people like Duane or Cori will never understand. There is no other way. They are "standards pro", they are "thought leaders". They think and behave like wrestlers that have to win a competition where everything is permitted from reification to spec injection and even back-stabbing. When the Burton Group writes "SOA is Dead" just to get enough publicity to acquire a few more "clients" (at the cost of wasting everyone else's time and pausing a few SOA initiatives that suddenly felt the urge to investigate whether SOA is really dead or not), you understand how sick our industry has become. Actually, Anne was quite right, this SOA, the one of the standards, the vendors and the analysts is dead. The users are taking matters into their own hands. They are tired to wait for these guys to produce anything of value.
Joe, unless we give them this kind of feedback, we'll keep being in this garbage-in and garbage-out mode. Don't you think that we, the users, deserve better? Don't you think we have listened enough to these guys? Look where they drove us.