Monday, February 25, 2008

The tooling is what's most important

Exploring the fundamentals of architecture and services in an SOA:

"the OrderService might be able to directly access certain information about order lines such as the number of lines on the order, without having to make a service operation call on the OrderLineService itself. In the same way, a call to the OrderLineService might return some basic order information as well, without the OrderLineService implementation having to make a call on the OrderService."

That may be true, but that's something that could be hidden from the developer. If the service-oriented approach is the most elegant from both an architectural and coding point of view, then, by all means, adopt that in each case, and optimize behind the scenes.

This is reminiscent of what IBM insightfully argues as to why they're still using EJB 2 rather than EJB 3 in the latest RAD 7.0 IDE release: it's the tooling that's most important! That's a very persuasive argument, and I agree completely with it. However, I have to ask: "where's the beef?" In other words, the existing tooling leaves a whole lotta room for improvement!



No comments: