First prize in the category "most spectacular arrival at a regional Zope Conference" goes to...

Phil Windley.

Service Oriented Architecture for e-Government

I have done a lot of work over the last eighteen months with Reach - the Irish Government Agency with responsibility for the Public Services Broker initiative.
A large part of my involvement has been the creation of an architectural model for e-Government with particular emphasis on the integration challenges encountered.
It is (to my definitions at least!) an example of a Service Oriented Architecture.
The architectural model can be found here(PDF) 270k.

Error messages, source code envy, utter frustration and how did we survive before the Web?

I have problems. Error messages. Java apps using Sun MQ. I have error numbers. Here are a few - C4055, B2009, B4006.
Normally, I'm a mere google away from information once I have the error numbers. Not in this case. Yes, I have tried Sun Forums. No joy. Boy is this frustrating!
Just in case some JMS guru is reading this blog...
I have three apps reading/writing MQ queues. Given just the right time ordering of activity, I can provoke a "B4006 - unable to attach to queue . A primary queue is already active.".
All doco I can find is silent on what a "primary queue is" and the circumstances that can lead to not being able to attach to them.
The good news is that the Singapore Noodles from the local takeway are cheering me up this Friday evening.

Illusion of interoperability

Kendall Clark, in a piece on xml.com about WS-Arch, says:

The web services architecture is concerned with making sure that all of the relevant standards are conceptually coherent, so that actually existing, deployed web services may work together. If the relevant standards cohere with each other, and if deployed services comply with those standards, interoperability may be a more likely outcome.

I state this conclusion in a very weak form because it's not clear that coherence and compliance are sufficient or necessary conditions of interoperability. I don't have space here to argue for that claim; email me privately if you're curious about it.

Kendall hits on a very, very important point. Remember DOS? Remember Int 21H? It appears to me that the WS-Arch uses the term "interoperablity" to mean that a programmer can write against a software interrupt spec. without regard to who provided the software interrupt "stack". This gains you very, very, little and is often at odds with what WS vendors tell you are getting.
API interoperability has basically nothing to do with data interoperability.
The big irony here is that if you look at the problem the other way round and focus on data interoperability *first*, we would be a lot further on in terms of real business level interoperability.

Generate Java object models from Relax schemas

Relaxer. Another reason not to use Relax NG bites the dust.

Picturing a Service Oriented Architecture

How would you draw and SOA? I am very opinionated on this point. I think you can tell a lot about where any proponent of SOA's is coming from by looking at how they draw it. This is an interesting list. No, I wouldn't draw an SOA like any of those. The diversity is very interesting I think. Compare Three tiered architecture.

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