Zeichick's Take: Snacks in the Break Room
February 15, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 2)
I once worked at a company that took up two full floors of a large office building. Each floor had two identical break rooms, equipped with tables, coffee maker, microwave, refrigerator and vending machines. Employees hung out in their own break room, mingling and chatting, having lunch, enjoying a hot beverage and even holding informal meetings.
Except, that is, when the members of one department brought in snacks. One small department, for example, had a regular weekly "goody day," when they rotated bringing in cookies or pastries. They were clearly marked "for such-and-such department"—but to nobody's surprise, nearly everyone in the company managed to sneak down to that department's break room for free treats.
After a few months, the departmental goody day was abandoned: too many people eating the home-baked food, not enough people supplying the goodies.
I was reminded of this last week, during an enjoyable visit with Miko Matsumura, VP of SOA product marketing at WebMethods. Conversations with Miko are always enjoyable; he's a big-picture thinker and sincere technology evangelist, one of the brightest young talents in our industry today.
The analogy, of course, is to SOA. In a service-oriented architecture, some applications publish services, and others consume them. The problem is that in an unmanaged SOA, you don't know who is consuming those services, just as you don't know who is eating Sally's brownies. Because you don't know who is consuming those services, you don't know who is relying upon them—and where you might have undocumented dependency issues that could come back to bite you later. If you take down a service that you published for your own department's applications to consume, some other application halfway across the company might suddenly fail.
None of this is strictly new, of course; we've faced this issue as long as we've had publish/subscribe methodologies. Web services and SOA, however, scale the problem tremendously.
A challenge, argues Miko convincingly, is that SOAs require implicit and explicit service guarantees—actually, he calls them agreements. The application publishing the service agrees to interoperate, to be available, to provide results to within a specified accuracy or reliability, and to provide an agreed-upon response time. The application consuming the service agrees to use it responsibly, and if necessary, compensate the service for its effort.
Share this link: http://sdt.bz/30152
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Appcelerator Acquires Cocoafish to Add Instant Mobile Cloud Capabilities to its Industry Leading Titanium Platform
Appcelerator Offers Messaging, Social, Location and Storage Mobile Cloud Services to All Mobile App Publishers
|
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
ComponentOne Releases a Collection of 40+ UI Widgets Powered by HTML5 and jQuery
ComponentOne has announced the 2012 release of Wijmo: a kit of UI widgets for HTML5 and jQuery development
|
|
Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists
|
|
Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles
|
|
Xceed releases UX-focused suite for Microsoft’s WPF
"Blendables" helps match user experiences to developer visions
|
Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.
|
|
Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.
|
|
RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!
|
|
GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
|
The Hidden Costs of Software Licensing
Moving beyond paper-based software licensing to more flexible, software-based licensing is a business decision. There is a growing trend tow...
|
|
Case Study: You May Need a Development Mechanic
As a contractor for a major financial player in Germany, SOBEGE, a German-based consultancy specializing in embedded IT and web services, wa...
|
|
Ensuring Software Quality at a Major International Bank
One of the world’s leading international banks has adopted AgitarOne technology for delivering generated unit tests for their Java software...
|
|
Load Testing Adobe Flex Applications
Adobe Flex applications may be different from applications you’ve worked with before. For classic HTML web applications, the server does all...
|