Saturday, December 27, 2003

What is a programming model?

My recent entry on programming models generated a couple of responses. Shane Claussen of IBM commented that the Service Network is the model, or perhaps the SoA is the programming model. Now, I fully agree that a service oriented architecture presents a programming model, but I am not sure if it should be considered the 'first-order' model.

Per my request, Shane went on a took a couple of stabs on the definition of a 'programming model':
1. A PM is the tools and methods for building a service or an application AND
2. The PM is the visible components of an architecture that a programmer codes to/with.

Hmmm. I like these definitions. I've scanned around the internet a bit... and haven't found much better.

But Frank Martinez, CTO of a leading service fabric company (BlueTitan) posed a new question:
What's more important (i.e. strategically relevant) to "you" (i.e. the practitioner)?:
1) Infrastructure-independent tooling
2) Tooling-independent infrastructure
3) Infrastructure-driven Tooling
4) Tooling-driven infrastructure


He went on to state, "My personal answer (and preference) with respect to your question would be that your service network should enable (and encourage) a variety of service-oriented programming models...each of which could be business driven in it its own right. Additionally, your service network should feature a service-oriented extensibility model that shouldn't be constrained by any one given programming-model."

I like this. The only thing I would add would be to encourage non-service oriented programming models in the network as well. Blasphemy? Perhaps, but I hope to make my case over the next several months.

"What is my Service Oriented Extensibility Model?"

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