The term SOA is DOA :-(

"I think SOA has turned into a semantics-free concept that can join 'components' and 'architecture'. It's beyond saving - so the concrete ideas that do have some substance need to get an independent life." -- Martin Fowler.

The industry only has itself to blame. Trying to convince customers that all the temporally coupled, three tiered architectures they had where, in reality, special cases of a beautiful new over-arching theory called SOA, has backfired.

Now the market thinks the tech. companies are pulling a stunt and they are largely right unfortunately.

I'm with Martin on this. Time to salvage the really useful bits out of the mess. Here are my suggestions:

• The noun/verb inversion in REST
  
• Temporal decoupling
  
• A "lets get real" approach to transactions
  
• Purpose-agnostic data representation
  
• An awareness that Object-oriented integration does not work in the large even though it works great in the small.
  
  

I will see your illocution and raise you a perlocution

Universal utterance machines.

The previous post was brought to you by...

flickr which effortlessly worked out my blogspot details to post an entry about a photo that was effortless licked off of my Fuji S304 by Ubuntu's USB smarts.

No vendor supplied device driver disk in evidence anywhere...

Idiot with a camera

warrior_worlds
Originally uploaded by PropylonSean.

An idiot with a camera makes no mistakes. His mistakes are volitional and are the portals of discovery...

I was in Nairobi. An acrobatics troop was doing its thing. My camera was in "idiot" mode (automatic everything).

Bad light, dodgy shutter speed but an interesting result.

This blog posting is brought to you by ...

ubuntu.

The most remarkable thing about my transition from Windows has been the non-event aspect of most of it.

On Windows I was a die-hard Emacs, Thunderbird, Firefox and Open Office wonk. Now that I'm on Ubuntu, I've switched to, um, Emacs, Thunderbird, Firefox and Open Office.

I have a big fat 250 Gig Western Digital FAT32 filesystem on USB that I can bob easily between Windows and Linux.

I've auto-mounted my Windows partition for ease of access.

Most of the things I've plugged into my ThinkPad T42P with Ubuntu booted have "just worked".

No messing with video drivers or network cards or any of that. I can browse my Windows network neighbourhood and generally just get stuff done without thinking about the fact that I now have an immeasurably larger toolset at my disposal than I had on Friday.

The Gnome desktop is servicable and pretty enough for my largely non-taxing GUI needs.

I got Java + Jython set up without hassles. Python is all over the place on Ubuntu. What's not to like?

At last, I have a laptop setup with some very, very serious headroom for software development.