Guy Wiener

Here it is, after three long days in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) course: The Rant. I probably shouldn’t do that, since I am giving a SOA course myself this semester. However, a good instructor should be sincere. SOA is not perfect. It is a good technological stack, that serves a slightly outdated methodology.

The point is that structural, procedural, top-down analysis never died. It was good for BASIC and it is still good today. A J2EE application is, apparently, just a COBOL routine with delusions of grandeur.

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Ogres are like onions. They have layers. Web services are also like onions. They too have layers. Inside the server there are services. Inside the services there are ports. Inside the ports there are operations. The operations receive messages. Inside the messages there are parts. Inside the parts there are documents. Inside the documents there are - finally! - Small bits of data. If there was a competition for “How many layers of fluff you can put around an int and still pretend that it makes sense”, Web services protocols would have won, by a long shot. If you send a single 32-bit number to a web service and delete a single character from the XML message that carries it, there’s a 100-to-1 chance that you won’t delete actual data.

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I’m now in a 3-day SOA course in John Bryce, courtesy of my IBM scholarship. I wanted to start ranting about SOA applications, but two things got in my way:

1. Those smart guys at John Bryce have a switch that turns off the students’ monitors while the instructor talks, so I can’t surf the web too much during the course (If only it worked with students’ cell phones…)
2. We didn’t actually learned any real SOA material yet Continue Reading »