What's yours is mine, what's mine is mine own

Try to take a teddy bear from a toddler and you will learn at first hand what ownership means to people. Ownership is clearly important to us all; but most distributed architectures fail to learn the lesson; most DC architectures assume that there is “someone in charge”, who implicitly own everything.

The SIC assumption is clearly not true for the Internet. I personally think that it is not all that true even within a single corporation. (Try to get a sales person to give you their Rolodex; toddlers are no competition.)

This, for me, is the true reason to be excited about Service Oriented Architecture. Finally, we are beginning to understand that a computer architecture that respects people's desire to maintain ownership is clearly more likely to be functional than one that does not.

Comments Should be Meaningless

This is something of a counterintuitive idea: Comments should be meaningless What, I hear you ask, are you talking about? Comments should communicate to the reader! At least that is the received conventional wisdom handed does over the last few centuries (decades at least). Well, certainly, if you are programming in Assembler, or C, then yes, comments should convey meaning because the programming language cannot So, conversely, as a comment on the programming language itself, anytime the programmer feels the imperative to write a meaningful comment it is because the language is not able to convey the intent of the programmer. I have already noticed that I write far fewer comments in my Java programs than in my C programs. That is because Java is able to capture more of my meaning and comments would be superfluous. So, if a language were able to capture all of my intentions, I would never need to write a comment. Hence the title of this blog.

Action at a distance

We are currently writing our first draft of the SOA Reference Architecture. Everyone is very busy doing their bit. My current section is on the Real World Effect of using a service. The RA is really an abstract architecture: we are not focusing on things like SOAP, or any of the other 60+ Web service specifications out there. We are trying to get at the essence of makes SOA special and how it can be made to work. It is a pretty basic aspect of services that we are trying to get something to happen: buy a book, get the weather forecast whatever. In other words: its action at a distance. I am communicating with you in the hope that we can get some mutual benefit. This already distinguishes SOA from the Web, whose basic abstraction is to acquire a representation of a resource will be rendered locally for human consumption. Actions are not inherently about representations, they are about changing the world - one book at a time. Action itself is a very difficult concept to get hold of. It ...

Organizing principles for services

One of the questions that comes up from time to time is how to define your services. This has come up for me in two independent fora: within the OASIS Service Oriented Architecture work and in the context of human provided services, for example at Genietown . In the work on the SOA Reference Model we decided that "services are the mechanism by which needs and capabilities are brought together"; i.e., its about needs and capabilities to satisfy those needs, and the access mechanism. However, this still begs the question somewhat. In the domain of human services, where the services are things like "building a home", "walking the dog", "taking care of my elderly parents"; it gets even fuzzier. Sometimes a service seems to organized around the person offering the service, for example, an architect, or a doctor. Sometimes the service is organized around a particular kind of product, such as doors or skylights. At other times, the service is organize...

Speaking My Mind

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