All,
Mike Rosen is a very sharp architect who has
written a number excellent publications. As his bio states, he is the
former Chief Architect at IONA Technologies. I found his work to be
extremely useful in my past customer engagements, for example, the white
paper entitled "Architecting Web Services" a fine body of work given
the state of the art of SOA and Web services at the time it was
published.
From one perspective, Mike is right in that even
those of us who are intimately familiar with the SOA-RM and who
have been working on the development of the SOA reference
architecture are finding difficult. That is taking the core
concepts of the SOA-RM down to the next level of abstraction, to the
reference architecture level and thus one step closer to
SOA implementation.
Nevertheless, there isn't a single concept
described in the SOA-RM that has either not already been implemented in
the real world or is not implementable. For example, the concept of service participants (consumers and
providers) and their interaction is very real and applied everyday in
practice, either as human-mediated interaction, machine-mediated interaction,
or both. So is the concept of visibility, which some in
industry associate with the notion of discovery. Obviously, in
practice, a service consumer with a specific need cannot "consume" a
service that provides the desired capability if that service is not
visible. And the list goes on and on.
What we need to do is educate the naysayers out
there by letting them know that the OASIS SOA-RM body of work fills what
has been a gaping hole in industry for a long, long time and that is to
describe the "essence" of a particular paradigm that is being considered or
actually is being applied to a particular problem domain; in this case, that
paradigm happens to be SOA and the problem domain happens to be bringing
those with needs and those with capabilities together in an
integrated business and IT context. [Incidentally, I wouldn't
classify Mike as a naysayer. I think his article had some very positive
things to say about the SOA-RM.]
As a
mental challenge, try and think of a single core SOA-RM
concept that has not been implemented in practice!
Cheers...
- Jeff E.