Google Wave
A few weeks ago I got an invitation for Google Wave. Some info I found about Google Wave:
“Wave is real-time e-mail. What that means is that when you’re writing a reply to a message (or ‘wave’) that you receive in the system, the recipient can see what you are typing as type it. ”
Didn’t I see this ‘innovative’ feature before? Yep…. it was 1996 when I was using the chat program PowWow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program) 
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So, I’m looking forward to using Google Wave for the collaboration process of writing an article. Let’s see whether or not it provides any additional value compared to plain old email.
By the way, PowWow also had support for VOIP, sharing a white board, and surfing the web together.
2nd International SOA symposium
October 22nd and 23th the 2nd International SOA symposium took place in the Word Trade Center in Rotterdam.
Let’s have a look at a short impression of these days.
Day 1
At 9.00 my former colleague Art Ligthart officially opened the conference. Next, Thomas Erl and Anne Thomas Manes gave their keynote lectures.
I followed Thomas and Anne to their presentation “Exorcising the Evil SOA: A Necessary Step Towards Next Generation SOA”. Quite a nice show about the exorcism of the Evil SOA, a black crowlike figure. He represented the “vendor-pushed, strongly marketed, it will solve all your problems” SOA. Fortunately everybody in the audience seemed to have seen Linda Blair during their childhood and it posed no problem to exterminate the Evil SOA. After this exorcism (during which somebody even fainted) the Good SOA arrived. With her nice white wings she told her how SOA should be. For a moment or two I considered wearing those wings to my presentation the next day 
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The second presentation I attended was the one of Clemens Utschig-Utschig and Torsten Winterberg: “Next Generation SOA Practices and Patterns”. Though there were some interesting elements in the presentation about specifying events, I had some problems with the outline. It was focused very much on BPEL and to “deal with” people BPEL4People is used. However, not all processes can be efficiently supported by activity-based process automation tools. Sometimes case-based management systems are more appropriate or even less structured social collaboration software. And… don’t forget…. a business process is about people! The tools should support people and not the other way around. All in all, the technical stuff in the presentation was good, but I have a bit of a different view on the notion of business process.
In the afternoon I wanted to attend the presentation “Why Business People & Software Architects Don’t Understand Each Other” by Jaap Schekkerman. Unfortunately the room was already full when I arrived.
Grady Booch provided the closing keynote “SOA as an Architectural Pattern: Best Practices in Software Architecture” using Second Life. This guy is really great! You can really notice that he back a long time. An entertaining detail: it was about 4.00 AM for him and every now and then a yawn came out. Concluding: I am a fan of Grady! Next year he should be attending IRL.
Day 2
The second day I had to skip the morning. The first presentation for me was “An Insider’s Look at BizTalk Server 2009: Integration Server, SOA Foundation, Gateway to Azure” of Brian Loesgen. Brian really had too much to say for 45 minutes, but to deal with this he had three presentation slots at the conference. Because I don’t often work with BizTalk it was nice to get an overview of the product.
Paul Mooney told us about “Service-Oriented Solution Evaluation Criteria”. I expected to get some info on how you can measure whether or not (or to which extent) a service conforms to certain principles. Instead it was a summary of the principles as they are defined by Thomas Erl.
Next, it was time for my little show with Alexander den Hartog: “Event-Driven SOA in a Dredging Environment”. Well, I liked giving the presentation with Alexander. I hope the participants feel the same .
In the following presentation the SOA manifesto was presented. Impressive how such a large group created actual results! Good job SOA manifesto group! Have a look at http://www.soa-manifesto.org/.
The last panel about the ESB with Jim Webber, David Chappell, Brian Loesgen and some other person of who I don’t remember the name (sorry!) was really really entertaining. Jim is well-known for his anti-ESB attitude… Also, the conclusion gave me quite a laugh “So, we can conclude that declarative specifying is better than …… uhmm….. uhmm… non-declarative specifying”.
All in all, I really enjoyed the symposium and I’m looking forward to next year’s edition!
2nd International SOA Symposium
Hi everybody, it has been a while since I’ve posted anything on this blog, because I’ve left Ordina and started my own company ICRIS (www.icris.nl). So now it’s high time to inform you about the 2nd International SOA Symposium (probably you’ve already heard about it). After last year’s success a lot of top speakers are coming to the Netherlands again. Just to give a small impression: Thomas Erl, Grady Booch and David Chappell. My former colleague, Art Ligthart, will be chainman of this event. Together with Alexander den Hartog I’ll give the presentation “Event-Driven SOA in a Dredging Environment”.
Please visit www.soasymposium.com and see you in Rotterdam, the Netherlands in October! There’s no excuse for any architect for not being there .
Selecting an SOA Delivery Strategy
Recently I wrote a scientific paper with Joeri Terlouw and Slinger Jansen on “An Assessment Method for Selecting an SOA Delivery Strategy” based on Joeri’s master thesis.
The article can be downloaded from http://www.icris.nl/wp-content/whitepapers/SOAdelivery.pdf, the full master thesis from http://www.icris.nl/wp-content/whitepapers/thesis_joeri_terlouw.pdf.
Let’s have a look at the abstract.
Abstract
Organizations should carefully consider which SOA delivery strategy, for instance top-down or bottom-up, to follow in migrating toward a service-oriented environment. Selecting a suboptimal strategy can result in spending more time and money than required, or in complete failure of the SOA project. However, selecting one is not easy. Organizations are often unaware of the existence of the different strategies and their situation-dependent pros and cons. Also, it is impossible for organizations to make a well-founded choice since a method for selecting an SOA delivery strategy is lacking. This paper bridges that gap by proposing an assessment method to select a delivery strategy based on specific characteristics of an organization. The method comprises a matrix that includes the influencing factors with their corresponding value ranges, and a weight calculation to determine their impact. Another contribution of this paper is the elicitation of four different delivery strategies that have never been chartered properly.
Making a service catalog work: 3 do’s and don’ts
A couple of years ago many organizations were taking their first steps into the world of SOA. Their main concern was which ESB to choose. After deciding whether to use the ESB from Tibco, Cordys, IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft, they thought the hard part was over. They started building web service like crazy and ended up with JABOWS (Just A Bunch Of Web Services) instead of a decent SOA. At the moment, I’m getting a lot of questions from clients regarding service identification and service specification (and SOA governance, but this will be topic of another blog post). Service identification is the process of determining which services the organizations actually needs. A while ago two colleagues and I wrote an article about ten frequently used approaches (http://www.soamag.com/I13/1207-1.asp). You’re welcome to comment if you see any approaches we did not describe. Of course, an organization cannot implement all the candidate services at the same time, nor does it need to. It starts out with the services having the highest priority and gradually builds its service portfolio. Now, as the portfolio grows, it is hard to keep track of the functionality of all these services. The service catalog becomes an important artifact for the service consumers to discover services and determine whether or not they fit their requirements. Even if you don’t ‘believe’ in the concept of reuse: consumers need a precise and unambiguous service specification to be able to use the service. If provider and consumer have different expectations of the behavior of a service, you’re bound to get problems. Let’s have a look at three do’s and don’ts for the service catalog.
Do’s:
1) Appoint a service catalog manager
A Business-Oriented Specification for Services
This is the abstract of my article for the CIAO workshop at the CAISE conference. Please let me know if you would like to read the complete article (published by Springer).
By far the best known standard for registering and searching for services is the UDDI. A great weakness of this standard is its technology-driven way of specifying services; it is still inadequate for specifying the majority of aspects that are relevant from a business point of view. This stands in sharp contrast to the main premises of SOA, i.e. increased flexibility by the reuse of services and better business/IT-alignment by speaking the same language. A more comprehensive approach to specifying services is the business component specification framework. One of the aspects that needs to be specified according to this framework are the business tasks. The framework, however, does not define precisely what a task is and how a task should be identified. In this paper we propose taking the enterprise ontology as a starting point for specifying these tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate our approach using a life insurance company case.
The First International SOA Symposium
October 7 and 8 the First International SOA Symposium took place in the Amsterdam Arena (the soccer stadium, home of the Dutch soccer club Ajax). Let me give you a short impression of this event by describing the presentations I attended (providing just a very limited view!).
Thomas Erl (SOA Systems) opened the conference with his keynote “The State of SOA”. Also, he launches two of his new books at this event: “SOA Design Patterns” and “Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA”.
Dutch National Architecture Conference
November 26 my colleague Art Ligthart and I will organize the SOA track of the 10th (!!) edition of the Dutch National Architecture Conference (LAC). The program is as follows:
11.45 – 12.30: A Canonical Data Model for a Common Semantics
Drs. Guus van der Meulen, Systeem Integratie Specialist, Ordina
12.30 – 14.00: Lunch
14.00 – 14.45: A Case Study at the IND (Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service)
Simone Dobbelaar, IND
14.45 – 15.00: Break
15.00 – 15.45: SOA belongs to the professional sports leagues! About the (un)usefulness of architectures and methods.
More info can be found at this website: LAC website.
CIAO! meeting, Antwerp
Motivation
In every university or research institute that belongs to the CIAO! Network, there will in principle be doctoral students that are supervised by a professor who belongs to the CIAO! Research Staff. In order to meet the quality standards of the CIAO! Network, these students should be guided to improve their work as much as possible. To this end the CIAO! Doctoral Consortium is constituted.
Objectives
The first objective of the CIAO! Doctoral Consortium is to encourage doctoral students to write, submit and present papers and to help them to improve the quality of the papers. The second objective is to be a platform for meeting each other as well as the members of the CIAO! Research Staff.
Organization
The CIAO! Doctoral Consortium consists of all CIAO! Doctoral Students and all members of the CIAO! Research Staff. Because of the geographical distribution of the CIAO! Network, it is practically impossible to let them meet all together. Therefore a local CIAO! Doctoral Consortium will be set up at every university or research institute that belongs to the CIAO! Network. Out of the local CIAO! Research Staff a Referee Board is selected. This board may invite persons from a CIAO! Company to be member of the Referee Board, provided (s)he has a doctoral degree. One of the members of the Referee Board is appointed to be the chair.
Mode of Operation
A local CIAO! Doctoral Consortium meets as often as is necessary to have every student present a paper once per year. At such a meeting of one full day, at most four students will present a paper. This guarantees that there is always sufficient time for discussions and for fulfilling the platform function. A presenting student has to distribute the paper (of 10-12 pages) in advance such that all members of the consortium have sufficient time to prepare for the meeting.
