Guerrilla SOA (SOA & The Tarpit of Irrelevancy)

This is the sixth in a series of blog posts where I discuss what I see wrong with SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) in the way that it's being sold by vendors. For those who are behind, you can read the previous installments here:

• Tactics vs. Strategy
• Standards-based vs. Standardized.
• Tools & Anti-behavior
• Rubick's Cubicle
• Triumph of Hope over Reason

In all the previous posts, I've been basically elucidating all the reasons why I think that most SOA projects are a quagmire: mis-understanding the goals of why you are involved in this approach, the way most vendors are poisoning the water by selling ridiculously complex tools and services, why it's so seductive for developers who fetish complexity to get knee deep in these projects, and hype. If you read all these posts back to back, you'll surely have the impression that I think all hope is lost for enterprise integration.

But it's not.

Just like any software project, it is possible to do SOA right. My colleague Jim Webber has done lots of outstanding work in this area, under a rubric called Guerilla SOA. The basic ideas are:

• treat SOA projects like any other project, and apply the same agile principles: continuous integration, testing, simplicity


• don't use tools just for the sake of using tools. Try to keep the tool stack as simple as possible, and as automated as possible


• use loosely typed endpoints and document/resource orientation to allow the different parts of your architecture evolve independently

It's best said from Jim's own mouth. Jim's British, so when he curses in technical presentations, people just think it's quaint (whereas when I do it, it's crass).

This is the way we generally approach SOA project: like other pursuits. SOA doesn't have to be a huge scary thing. It's just software, and we aren't going to throw our playbook out the window just because it sounds scary.

The term SOA has been so co-opted by vendors trying to sell stuff that I think it will die off as a term. We'll still be doing soa (note the lower case letters), but we'll have develop another three-letter acronym because the old one has slipped into the tarpit of irrelevancy.

Speaking at the Colgne JUG Monday, April 20th

I'll be speaking at the Cologne Java Users Group on the eve of the JAX Conference, on Monday, April 20th at 7 PM. I'm letting the JUG organizer pick the topic, so I'm not sure what I'll be talking about, but I'm looking forward to it: I've never spoken at a German JUG before. If you're in the neighborhood, stop by and we'll geek out, then have a real beer afterwards.

Update: Here is a link to the slides I presented at the JUG. Thanks for having me; I had a great time.

Real World Refactoring in NFJS the Magazine

Several people have asked me what ever happened to the NFJS Anthology book series (The NFJS Anthology, Volume 1 and The NFJS Anthology, Volume 2: What Every Software Developer Should Know. Both books contained essays built around some subject speakers were passionate about that year. Alas, the publishing business being what it is, there wasn't enough demand to justify continuing the series.

After much discussion, it was decided that the series would be more dynamic in magazine form rather than book form, which explains the formation of the NFJS the Magazine. This is a monthly publication written by NFJS speakers about something they are talking about this year, and of course something they are interested enough to speak and write about. Being in an magazine format makes it a bit easier to keep up to date, and the volume of material is higher because you get several articles a month.

I have a Real World Refactoring talk in the upcoming issue, based on my talk of the same name this year. If you go to a No Fluff, Just Stuff show, you get a free copy of the magazine, but anyone can subscribe

RailsConf Interview by Chad Fowler with Paul Gross and me

One of the marketing tools that RailsConf uses is a series of interviews with upcoming talks. Chad sent some interview questions to Paul and myself around our upcoming talk Rails in the Large: Building the Largest Rails Application in the World, and he's posted it on his site. Want some opinionated conversation about Rails and how to use it to build Enterprise applications, then here it is (and we didn't use an Scala!). Enjoy!