The root problem that both are attempting to address is that the term SOA has entered the realm of Newspeak. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on SOA. It starts out with a perfunctory nod towards inclusiveness with SOA is usually based on Web services standards (e.g., using SOAP or REST) that have gained broad industry acceptance.. It later goes on to enumerate those Web Services protocols: XML, HTTP, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI. That section concludes with Note, however, that a system does not necessarily need to use any or all of these standards to be “service-oriented.” For example, some service oriented systems have been implemented using Corba.
Newspeak, I’s tells ya. The terminology itself leads one to think in terms of layers of abstraction and obfuscation to the point where one of the fundamental pillars of the web becomes unthinkable.
Don’t get me wrong. I agree with pretty much every word in Dion and Alex’s articles. I particularly like Dion’s admonition against reliance on automatically generated stubs and serial abstractions. I see it all the time. Tools and specs that treat either HTML or XML as “merely a serialization format”... i.e., something to be consumed and produced exclusively by tools.
Irony alert: both of these authors often write on the topic of “agility”, and yet nearly a year after Atom was declared ready for implementation, both continue to produce Atom 0.3 feeds. Lack of agility perhaps? Or is it that they both treat feeds as merely a serialization format?
No, my problem is that they don’t go far enough. They don’t address what has become all but unthinkable in these layers of abstractions.
There is a term that you won’t see in the body of Dion’s post. Or in the body of Alex’s. Or in the Wikipedia article on SOA.
That term is “hypertext link”. Or even the term “link”.
Note: you will find the term “link” in one of the section headers in the Wikipedia article, but that’s merely because Wikipedia itself is “of the web” as opposed to the subject matter being covered by that particular article.
The link is the glue that holds the web together. It is what differentiates the web from protocols like ftp that merely serve as access methods for documents.
The very notion of a link has become practically inexpressible and virtually unthinkable in the vernacular of SOA.
Sam Ruby: WOA vs ROA
jcgregorio : Sam Ruby: WOA vs ROA - Show me the linky. Tags : http roa soa...
+1 to Sam Ruby’s post: The link is the glue that holds the web together. It is what differentiates the web from protocols like ftp that merely serve as access methods for documents. The very notion of a link has become practically inexpressible and virtually unthinkable in the vernacular of SOA. The industry as a whole has become so dependent......
[more]
Pragmatic Service-Oriented Architecture: Introducing the WOA/Client
This article describes a new set of basic usage patterns that are intended to capture the current state-of-the-art in designing interactions with Web services in mature, robust Web-Oriented Architectures (WOA). For those just tracking it, I’ve...
I think Michael Kay once remarked that it seems impossible to come up with either a system that is a SOA, and nothing else (three tier, whatever) or with a system that is not a SOA. So if a term can’t be used to define something exclusive or inclusive, the term is worthless.
I knew it was all going wrong when the system architect insisted our application use a web service to retrieve a bunch of JPEG maps. Each map was generated based on the values of three parameters. The three parameters, together contain about 20 chars of information. Using enclosures to return the maps with thee SOAP HTTP response was too slow, so we modified the web service to returns a list of URLs. The client then GETs each URL to retrieve the maps.
I agree. In the well-intentioned push to separate concerns, we’ve wound up with stacks of message layers piled on component layers piled on data layers. The backbone of service architectures should revolve around the fact that most data is hierarchical and relational. That should bode well for the Web and XML — but it doesn’t.
Instead, the debate seems to be about propagating programming models in some sort of vacuum where concepts counter to OOP are absent. I work in the ERP applications space, so I don’t pretend to speak for all situations. But I think that data, code, and message constructs all need to be connected in modern service architectures. Casting the data domain as a constrained hypermedia set is a cornerstone of that approach.
+1 for Simon Tilkov who +1’s Sam Ruby. Simon Tilkov says: The industry as a whole has become so dependent on abstractions that they’re used without regards for their benefit. Sam Ruby says: The link is the glue that holds the web together. It is...
Dion Hinchliffe’s recent WOA/Client article went pretty close to making my head explode. Calling WOA/Client the “Pragmatic Service-Oriented Architecture”, the article contains a pretty diagram that reduces the use of web...
Sam Ruby - WOA vs ROA: "There is a term that you won’t see in the body of Dion’s post. Or in the body of Alex’s. Or in the Wikipedia article on SOA. That term is “hypertext link”. Or even the term “link”. [...] The link is the glue that holds the...
Sam Ruby writes; The very notion of a link has become practically inexpressible and virtually unthinkable in the vernacular of SOA. That’s an awesome soundbite, but I don’t think that’s the (whole) problem because SOA/WS does have...
I was pleased to see Sam’s kind word (excellent) regarding Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), despite the caveat (as far as [it] goes). While I greatly appreciate Dion’s evangelization of WOA (see my comments), I coined WOA (for better or worse--since...
Exploring the WOA/Client Approach: Pattern #1 - Run-Time Web Service Contract Checking
Last week we enumerated a pragmatic approach for designing the interactions between clients and services in a Web-Oriented Architecture, which we called WOA/Client. Some of the initial feedback was that this was too high-level a description to be...
Update: A Spanish translation of this post is available, thanks to Adrián Moreno Peña. Web has been the apex of networking, both from software and social perspective. The extreme software networking has turned Web into communication, social...
Sam Ruby comments on Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) and Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA), claiming them both excellent. But he feels the community is forgetting about the Web’s fundemental building block…the hyperlink. The link is...
Sam Ruby’s recent post has made me think some more. I’ve wondered for a while why my reaction is so negative when someone emphasizes that SOA is just an architectural concept, and Web services just one possible implementation strategy, with REST, CORBA, RMI, JINI etc. as alternatives [1]. It’s not that I’m a big fan of Web services — I......
[more]
Are component-based web frameworks a good idea for developers? Are they a good idea for clients? Norman Richards says Open source WebObjects is worth looking at. Particularly because "WebObjects because it is one of the best examples of the power of...
mod_JK HOWTO [Getting mod_jk to work with Jetty is harder than it should be.] The Apache Tomcat Connector WOA vs ROA [At the end of the day it does come to links.] Pragmatic Service-Oriented Architecture: Introducing the WOA/Client Replacing Service...
REST Web Services, a book in progress by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby piqued my interest yesterday. From the introduction:"We want to restore the World Wide Web to its rightful place as a respected architecture for distributed...
Duncan Cragg’s latest Business Functions | The REST Dialogues is a good introduction to one of the most subtle elements of REST design: translating business functions into HTTP requests. A Real eBay Architect Analyzes Part 3 is an interesting...
It’s good to see some backlash against the nofollow tag. nofollow is a bad idea that goes against the fundamental principle of the web: that links are important because they mean something. They are perhaps even more important than the objects being...
Constraints Are Good, The Network is the Computer -- More at 11
Ben Carlyle has been serving up some really great stuff over at Sound Advice . In particular Ben correctly identifies that SOA is a totally unconstrained architecture and this is why REST is a superior solution. Wait. Isn’t SOA’s unconstrained...
Via Stepen Lewis comes a very interesting paper: The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in Research Libraries . The paper provides a compelling perspective on internet search and the general problem of...
I tossed out a post two days ago proposing a “manifesto”, similar to the Agile and other such manifestos, to encode the ideas that are at the heart of what some of us in the enterprisey world are trying to do. I got some helpful comments on that...
Interesting couple of days with regard to the (never ending) debate between proponents of SOA and proponents of ROA. On the one hand, the QCon conference (good grief, I wish I could have gone to that) in Heaven appears to have been the blast it was...
What Is WOA? It's The Future of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
The need for businesses everywhere to open up their silos of information and internal capabilities across their organizations, as well as to the rest of the world has, becoming an increasingly pressing issue for most organizations. And in the last...
I know Dr. Jim Webber is a really smart guy but I can’t help but think this warning against Anemic Service Models is all sorts of wrong. First, the web makes a pretty convincing case that cohesion is very overrated. At the internet scale loose...
The big leap for developers building distributed solutions is the realization that distributed computing is a different kind of computing . The world of fine-grained method calls and shared state that exist inside the local machine is completely...
Web-Oriented Architecture (and REST) is Gaining Enterprise Mindshare Nick Gall, a VP of Gartner, first coined the TLA (three-letter acronym) for WOA (Web-oriented architecture) in late 2005. In further describing it, Nick simply defines it as: WOA...
Great Series on REST and Resource-Oriented Architecture
Whether You Call it ROA or WOA, It Simply Works Brian Sletten, newly with Riot Games, has just completed his four-part REST for Java developers series on JavaWorld.com. The series, which began last October, was wrapped up this week. The series is...