Friday, October 20, 2006

CIO Paul Coby is Waiting for VHS

British Airways CIO Paul Coby is quoted as saying, "We don't want to invest in Betamax when VHS becomes the standard. There's no point in BA trying to go its own way on that. We will wait and see what standards emerge." (referring to SOA)

ROTFL.

Uh, Paul - the VHS version of SOA came out 5 years ago. And SOA isn't about the stupid standards - it's a way of integrating business and I.T.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

OASIS SOA-RM Passes

The news is out:
The ballots for approval of Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture v1.0 as an OASIS Standard (announced at [1]) has closed. There were sufficient affirmative votes to approve the specification. However, because there was a negative vote, the SOA Reference Model Technical Committee must decide how to proceed, as provided in the OASIS TC Process, at http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process.php#3.4. A further announcement will be made to this list regarding their disposition of the vote.


IMHO, the real value of this passing is that people can quit working on it. The RM is an abstract document that is used by professional conceptual RA developers (of which there are about 10 in the world). This particular standard was... very popular by the people who wrote it... and not so popular by everyone else.

Initially, MomentumSI was the sole No Vote, but we pulled the vote so that the committee could just put it to bed and move on. Unfortunately, someone else voted no saying that the RM was so generic that it served no purpose. Well, they do have an interesting point... here's an interesting test, see if Client/Server architecture passes the SOA litmus test as defined by OASIS... Hmmm....

Again - 'architecture by committee' is a hard thing to do. I don't envy these guys. The next test that these guys have is to make up their mind on the RA. Will it be a Conceptual RA or a Profile Based RA?