Frank Cohen's Blog

My blog entry elicited a response from Jason at ZapThink. He asked – more or less - what he doesn't get? I also received a request to help parse part of the blog.

My blog shows that I'm bothered by two things: using the word Divorce when talking about SOA and Web Services and iTKO's skeptical position on why they give away Lisa Web Services.

Jason E's blog entry says: "Yes, [iTKO Lisa Web Services] can be useful, but we honestly believe that Web Services testing on its own will never deliver the quality levels required to achieve Trust in your SOA applications."

Perhaps I'm taking this the wrong way but I read that as... We will give you a partial solution for free and wait for you to fail because the real solution - the SOA one - costs $$$. There is a skepticism there that is wholly inappropriate for where we are in the growth of the IT industry. Imagine the developers, QA technicians, and IT managers in a business or organization that adopts both SOA and Web Services. How does offering a free Web Service testing utility solve their needs?

To Jason B.'s report, we shouldn't be using terms like Divorce because of the heavyweight emotional negative context it evokes. What CIO from divorced parents is going to think that Web Services + SOA is a good thing? We should be writing from the perspective of "All this new communication, new rapid integration, and new interoperability built with XML, Platforms, Applications, and Databases is yielding great benefits for our businesses and organizations." It doesn't matter if the approach is SOA or Web Services or some wonderous mix of both.

Jason B. raises a valid point to my previous blog entry. I should have not written that Jason does not get it because that criticizes Jason the person, instead of Jason's actions.

Finally, in my blog I wrote:

"SOA keeps the WS component idea, focuses on composite applications for business workflows, and loses discoverable service idea for statically brokered endpoints, governance for choreography, business issues, troubleshooting, and Quality Of Service (QOS.)"

and a reader asked the question:

"How did you intend to parse [that paragraph]? Did we "lose" governance for choreography? Or substitute governance for choreography? Or "focus on" governance for choreography..."

Let me put it this way…

SOA and Web Services both start with the idea of saving money and effort by reusing software components. SOA uses composite applications and master data management techniques to implement business processes and workflows. SOA is different from Web Services in that it does not require discoverable services at runtime, but instead implements a governance plan where statically brokered endpoints, choreographed components, and defined Quality of Service goals are stated.

And the most important point is… SOA and Web Services work well together.