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HOME >> OPINIONS

Guest View: Sometimes, slower is better

By Michael Rowley

February 3, 2009 — (Page 1 of 3)
New technology for simplifying development is always good, right? New APIs and servers just make it easier to develop SOA applications, right? And, of course, developers have all the time they need to adjust to the big changes that SOA development imposes on them.

Of course, this isn’t true. With any technological change as important—and beneficial—as the shift to SOA, it takes time for developers and businesses to absorb the important standards, to implement them in real applications and to get comfortable with the impact of SOA on the overall development environment. In short, it is important for vendors to release technology on a schedule that makes it possible for users to consume the technology, and to support it in ways that allow developers and businesses to recoup their investments in those products.

Michael Rowley

Recent announcements from Microsoft got me thinking about the tension between a vendor's desire to create new development technology and the developer's desire for predictability in the pace of change for the technologies they use to accomplish their work.

Microsoft will soon be releasing Workflow Foundation (WF) 4.0, which will have some big changes from previous versions, primarily for the purpose of simplifying development. There will now be a flowchart workflow style, which will join the sequential and state machine workflow styles that already exist.

WF will be integrated with the Windows Communication Framework, and developers will be able to deploy the resulting Web-service enabled workflows to the “Dublin” application server. So the first question that comes to mind is, if you can develop Web-service-enabled flowcharts using WF and deploy them to Dublin, how many people will still be interested in buying BizTalk Server? Actually, that is just a question for Microsoft product management to worry about. I’ve got bigger questions.

How many technologies do we need to accomplish the same thing? How many times can Microsoft add a new technology for simplifying development before the number of simplifying technologies becomes just too complex to follow? Once we have learned the latest-and-greatest way of developing apps, how long should we be able to expect that knowledge and those skills to be relevant? And what about the code and other artifacts? Even if there is an attempt to continue to execute code from older versions, it is hard for any vendor to provide comprehensive forward-compatibility for abandoned products.

Related Search Term(s): SOA, software development, standards, Microsoft

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