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Services Rise to the Surface


By Larry O'Brien
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June 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 2)
For 40 years, we’ve known that successful software design features self-contained modules that do one thing well. In the 1960s, such systems were described as highly cohesive and loosely coupled; in the 2000s, we call them service-oriented. Service-oriented architectures don’t increase the abstraction of how we approach systems; they reiterate what we already know: It’s good to compose systems from fully functional (and debugged) subsystems.

Discussions of SOAs pay great attention to the presence of the network and its implications for data transport. This is understandable, since spending a few milliseconds transmitting a network message rather than accessing RAM is the same millionfold decrease in performance that sending a piece of paper across the Pacific by container ship bears to a face-to-face conversation. Crippling differences in access time were not unknown in the 1960s either, as anyone with a copy of Knuth’s volume on sorting and searching and a memory of tapes, whether magnetic or paper, can attest.

We are at the dawn of the multicore and manycore era (a friend just went to four cores, and I’ve been spec’ing out a similar system, because my life just doesn’t have enough drama without adding water-cooled electronics to the mix). As I discussed in a previous column (“Under Concurrence,” Feb. 15, page 32), we are poorly prepared. Service-oriented architecture is one of the few current memes that map into the concerns that will soon begin dominating the technical aspects of software development. Patrick Logan, blogging at patricklogan.blogspot.com, puts it succinctly when he says, “SOA in its best possible interpretation is just reality for tomorrow’s programmers.”

By the time you read this, broad access to a feature-complete beta of Windows Vista is likely to be available. I hedge the statement because, at this point, Windows Vista release dates are about as reliable as those for “Duke Nukem Forever.” Even though by all accounts the Vista death march is ending and the operating system is garnering positive early notices, its schedule delays and “resets” are all the testimony needed to say that the challenges for Microsoft’s flagship product are only going to increase in the years ahead.




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