Looking beyond the boundaries of SOA ... huh?
Just as we have started to become comfortable with service oriented architectures (SOA) we notice that major vendors are talking about going beyond SOA. This raises a few concerns in my mind, because we never seem to find the time to get fully comfortable with concepts and technologies, are never able to design and develop solutions in a consistent and more importantly measurable manner and often find ourselves spending time and resource to investigate a new concept or technology, only to find that we have encountered in an entity wearing a new pyjama, often a new TLA (three lettered acronym … or should that be Terrible Linguistic Anomaly?), yet containing a well known core.
Who out there remembers the Convergent Technologies Operating System (CTOS)? Those who do would remember that it is message based and service based … perhaps it is the most misunderstood and forgotten piece of technological excellence, which even included pinches of SOA … and that in the early 80’s.
It even introduced the modular … we used to call it the toaster concept … end extensible hardware, a concept for which a major prize was recently awarded (see http://dotnet.org.za/willy/archive/2006/01/16/49266.aspx for details). Again it seems the CTOS era was “back to the future”.
I have run away from my initial blob thoughts … like New Horizon traveling at the rate of knots (50’000km/sec that is) away from Earth towards Pluto.
What really concerns me is that we do not seem to get the opportunity to adopt a concept of technology, ensuring maximum benefit and “value to business”, only to be forced by the vendor technology evolution to multi-thread between old, current and new … mastering none. Is it not time that we stabilize, take a deep breath and get maximum benefit from what we have today, before we dream of tomorrow? It is probably not going to benefit our strive for excellence and evolution, however, it would allow us to deliver information systems to business more consistently and continuously improving both our delivery process and the associated solutions.
... enough pondering for today, I need to get back to the exploration of 64-bit, VS2005, VSTS, WinFX ...