RE: [soa-blueprints] Anti-Blueprints

["Beack, Theo" <Theo.Beack@softwareagusa.com>]

When faced with a complex problem I usually start by eliminating elements that is not causing the problem. Starting work on this TC however, by looking into what are not a blueprints, seems counter productive to me. We could potentially consider a very large number of things that are considered to be "anti-patterns" and yet not do much work on producing good, solid blueprints/patterns.  My preference would be to explore potential blueprints first.

 

I'm pretty sure that we could find many "anti-patterns" in the cause of our work. In fact, I'm sure that when we examine the blueprints we will find that many (if not most) were born out of the experience of this group and much of that experience would have come from observing mistakes made and finding ways to correct them. I suggest that as we progress and create blueprints, we should add a section to each (or find a way to document) the factors that might prevent successful creation/implementation/reuse of services.

 

Regards

Theo

 

 

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From: Jones, Steve G [mailto:steve.g.jones@capgemini.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2005 14:21
To: soa-blueprints@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [soa-blueprints] Anti-Blueprints

The SOA Blueprints will lay down a “best practice” set of guidelines and templates for delivering SOA.  This will definitely be a positive thing and help expand and firm up people’s understanding of SOA.  One thing that the group states that it will do is define standards and guidelines, does this mean that allied to our blueprints we must also consider the “anti-blueprints” (analogous to anti-patterns) that must be avoided.  So for instance focusing on process over service (bad), only thinking of web services (bad) etc etc.  Defining the blueprints give guidance towards success criteria, but should we also give guidance on failure criteria for acceptance of a system as being “SOA”.

  

Not sure whether this should be in the TC as its laying down best practice, and not to increase the already large workload… but it needs to be somewhere.

 

My top 5 are

 

1)       If you’ve started with an enterprise “best practice” process map you are NEVER going to be SOA and 90% probability your system will be inflexible or fail.

2)       Web Service point to point is STILL point to point, doing a bad practice in XML doesn’t make it better

3)       Splitting into two separate tiers of Service and Process with separate rules and governance results in divergent solutions

4)       Creating “business” services based on the belief that IT understands the business results in services that meet neither IT nor business goals

5)       Building your own proprietary XML-RPC stack to give yourself “control“

 

The last could still be SOA from one perspective, but I’ve yet to see it done well when the driver was a belief that its better done in house than using standards.  When we get the official Wiki it could be something to document via that route.

 

Steve

 

 

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Steve Jones | Capgemini

CTO, Application Development Transformation

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