Describing a reference model for SOA...
I got an email from Nichole last week about a talk that she was going to give on the OASIS Reference Model for SOA this Wednesday (tommorow) on the Microsoft campus.
As this was the first time that I had heard of the reference model, I decided to read through it. Fortunately, I found nothing too surprising or new. The following comment, however, made me really think:
...the terms "loose couplising" and "coarse-grained" are commonly applied as SOA concepts, but these terms have intentionally not been used in the current discussion because they are subjective trade-offs and without useful metrics. In terms of needs and capabilities, granularity and coarseness are usually relative to detail for the level of the problem being addressed, e.g. one that is more strategic vs. one down to the algorithm level, and defining the optimum level is not amenable to counting the number of interfaces or the number of types of information excanges connected to an interface ...
Initially, I was suprised that "loose coupling" and "coarse-grained" were not part of the reference model. After rereading the paragraph and giving it some thought, I have come to agree with the RM. What are your thoughts?
See the following link for more information: https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=soa-rm
Ali
Comments
- Anonymous
February 25, 2006
Some of us that wrote the RM were suprised we had the guts to exclude one of the most typical subjects when discussing SOA :-)
We really did feel that it would be inapropriate for a reference model to discuss the trade offs between coarse and fine grained messages in an SOA environment. I expect this subject to become relevant in at least one of the reference architectures that are planned to be built with SOA-RM as their basis. - Anonymous
March 01, 2006
Thanks Matt, I look forward to more on that subject.
Ali