Satya Komatineni's Blog

June 2008 Archives

It serves well to remember what inspires

It serves well to remember what inspires. I repeat here a paragraph from Ivan Sutherland followed by links to read the rest.

"I, for one, am and will always remain a practicing technologist. When denied my minimum daily adult dose of technology, I get grouchy. I believe that technology is fun, especially when computers are involved, a sort of grand game or puzzle with ever so neat parts to fit together. I have turned down several lucrative administrative jobs because they would deny me that fun. If the technology you do isn’t fun for you, you may wish to seek other employment. Without the fun, none of us would go on." ..Ivan Sutherland

I came to read this paragraph prompted by James Gosling's Weblog recommending to read his essay on Technology and Courage. I shall not leave a link to the article here as I am hoping you would go there after reading James Gosling's note on it. :)

A False ceiling: What is behind that blanket of SOA?

I believe in working with my children to clean up their rooms. Time is not always on my side, however. So my 10 year old showed me the other day how nicely she had been cleaning up her room. Everything seemed in order until I have come to find she pushed everything under the bed and covered up with a blanket.

It is not an uncommon argument in an enterprise, where the thought is to hide everything behind a bus of SOA. Couple that with the hype where once upon a time CORBA solved all problems and then EJBs solved all problems. Now SOA is on the lips of many that probably have never written a line of code. It is difficult to argue with someone who is not a goldsmith that what is glittering is not necessarily gold.

I have a two story house and it looks fabulous looking up with popcorn ceilings until one day the bathroom upstairs started leaking a bit of water. I thought, "Probably replace a pipe here and a coupling there and that should fix it". Through a tiny hole I climbed up to see. I hope what is behind a SOA wall is rational.

1. I have a suspicion that SOA may play only a second fiddle (addressing transport and discovery) to the synergistic programming triangle of (Objects, XML, Databases).

2. I also feel that SOA is best looked as an "intra" system framework first and then only as an "inter-system" framework.

3. my other web log

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.