05/10/08 :: [SOA] BEA's Epitaph [permalink]
Stu is arguably one of the brightest and most knowledgeable person I know. He published BEA's epitaph a couple days ago. I too remember the "Tanga" days and I have also been quite privileged to experience an era that started in 1995 (when the first application server was released, NeXT's webObjects) till now.
IMHO, BEA's failure is not just BEA's failure, it goes far beyond BEA, it represents the failure of the industry at large -including OSS- to create a modern programming model to build 21st century class information systems. It also represents the failure of the standardization process (not standards) that delivers large collections of politically charged, character tainted, poorly aligned, lowest common denominator... specifications.
Of course Stu is a member of the REST-based programming model community, and he points out the Architecture of the World Wide Web document, as the solution moving forward.
Somehow it looks like this solution came to him after realizing that:
... I had stopped believing that SOA would make anyone's life any easier, and reading some of the ITIL v2 material that was guiding our efforts also really just seemed to reinforce that we were following in the grand tradition of "smart people building skyscrapers to nowhere".
Stu, I work for a BEA shop and my management had asked me to elaborate on all the SOA domains that you guys have defined. I can assure you that you guys were millions of miles away from providing guidance that would deliver successful SOAs. You simply did not get it.
Today, your analysis is that returning to the principles of the Web is somehow going to give us this magical programming model that everyone is looking for. What's the evidence? I am desperately seeking that evidence. Even though some people don't like my style, I am genuinely open to anything that works. I have no technology or product interest, I work for an IT organization. I do expect that people would be just as open as I am, but that's not always true.
Could there be a possibility that one more time you would be going in the wrong direction? Have you ever considered that your experience and training conditioned you to pretty much create the same programming model over and over? from EJB to Web Services to REST. Behind the bytes, isn't it the same thing?
Now, isn't it clear that the Web, even though it is the largest information system by far, has a very limited programming model unsuitable for building enterprise class information systems?
Let's just take an example, don't you realize that for instance, and because it lacks a robust programming model (for good reasons of course, and this is precisely why it has been so successful), you are actually diverting the very concept of a URI
The choice of syntax for global identifiers is somewhat arbitrary; it is their global scope that is important.
to hand code all kinds of programming semantics behind it.
I don't mean to piss any one off, because Stefan, Subbu and Teo have agreed to tell me how they would implement resource lifecycles in a RESTful way, but I just want to point out that BEA's death is somewhat the death of an era and a programming model.
Stu, the way I view it, when you say the "Web is enough" you are simply rejecting the all the vendors (small or large, from Redmond to Waldorf) as well as the standards and technologies they produce, rather than convincingly provide a solution to the problem.