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 
.
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!
[...] the blog of Linda Terlouw, I remembered having the same expectations on the “Service-Oriented Solution [...]