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Upcoming talks at TechEd EMEA in Amsterdam...

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Sorry about the long delay in blogging...

I was supposed to present at TechEd SanDiego a few weeks ago but my mother passed away on May 19th...  We will all miss her, especially my 84 year old father who is quite lonely now...

I wanted to tell everyone that I am working on getting a website going that will contain all the ongoing (and much of the past) work that I am involved with.  I have set a target of the beginning of July to get this going.  Many of the topics I've wanted to blog on required so much context from my presentations and papers that I've been reticent to blog them.  Hopefully, having the ability to link to this content will create a better dynamic.

I am committed to six sessions at TechEd EMEA starting on June 29th.  I am VERY exceited about this but have a ton of powerpoint work!  Some of these are done and others are still a mess.  Here's the abstracts of what's coming!  Hope you can join us in Amsterdam!

More blogging soon...

Love,
Pat

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GNLARC – Metropolis: Independent and Interconnected

This is general session for the Architecture Track at TechEd EMEA.

In this talk, we examine the parallels between urban development and the development of IT shops.  In the 1800s, railroads connected independent cities and stimulated changes in manufacturing, retail, and standardization.  We argue that this very much like what is happening today as independent IT shops are connected by the Internet.

The forces let loose by this interconnection lead us to service orientation just as our economy has developed independent companies offering manufacturing and retail which work together.  The metropolitan analogy offers some surprising predictions for the future of IT.

At the end of this presentation, I am excited that Don Box and David Chappell are going to help me with a surprise!  It promises to be a lot of fun and very, very memorable.  For those of you that can’t see it live, we will get the video up on the web by early July!  Tons of work in this one!  Planning, rehearsing… lots of work!

ARC302 – Metropolis: Building Applications in a Service Oriented Architecture

Some buildings adapt to change and continually renew themselves to take on a new life as their environment evolves.  An examination of buildings shows that there are certain design characteristics that make buildings more adaptable.  In the last few decades, there has been an increasing trend towards the creation of buildings which fit within a framework of use and all for many adaptations and reuse.  Examples of this include strip malls for retail and industrial parks for light manufacturing and many other uses.

These trends can be seen in applications and how they are or are not designed to cope with a changing environment.  This talk examines the parallels between buildings and applications and shows the re-emergence of these patterns in the virtualization of systems and the creation of service oriented architectures.

ARC 303 – Metropolis: Using Interchangeability

Through the 19th century, manufacturers invested in making machines to make the creation of machine parts faster and easier.  In a separate effort largely by the armories producing small arms for the US War Department, significant effort was made to make parts so identical that they may be interchanged across two different guns.  This effort was surprisingly difficult over a forty year period.  Simple machine tools created parts that were so inaccurate that they still required manual fitting and adjusting to make a working machine.  It was only through the combination of machine tools and interchangeability that we arrived at the mass production techniques of manufacturing that have so changed our world.

If you consider the interaction of services as they send request for operational functions, we see the same challenges of interchangeability.  Distrusting services won’t support classic distributed transactions and this necessitates the use of operational requests that may be subsequently canceled.  For the service providing the functions, this is only practical to the extent that the tentative operations are interchangeable.  Just as most people in the 19th century thought precision interchangeability of manufactured parts was a silly endeavor compared to fitting by highly skilled craftsmen, most programmers don’t recognize the importance of operations that are so equivalent that some may be canceled later without causing duress.

This talk explores the history of manufacturing and highlights some of the important challenges we have in creating collections of interoperating services.

ARC402-- Thoughts on Data in Service Oriented Architecture

Services provide a formal boundary of computing.  Inside a service we typically find data that is needed for the operation of the service.  In between services, we see the flow of operational requests and the transmission of data. This talk explores the difference between data on the outside that flows between services and data on the inside that is maintained for the internal use of the service.

As data is transmitted between services, we need to recognize that it is immutable and, once it is written, can only be changed by creating a new version for transmission.  Schema definition and extensibility take on new importance in the world outside of services.  This talk explores these design issues with an emphasis on pragmatic design choices made in the architecting of services and the interaction between them.

Finally, we examine the characteristic of SQL, Objects, and XML.  Each has its strengths and weaknesses.  We observe that the characteristics that make SQL wonderful for representing internal data, Objects wonderful for software engineering, and XML wonderful for communicating across services are exactly the characteristics that are challenges in other usages.  For SQL, Objects, and XML, their amazing strengths in one use are the essence of their weakness in another use.   We need all three but we need each in its place of strength.

PLN005 – Metropolis: Implementation Advice for the Service-Oriented Enterprise

This is a panel discussion with: Pat Helland, Arvindra Sehmi, David Hill, Maarten Mullender, and Steve Cook.

ARC230 – The Nerd, the Suit, and the Fortune Teller

This is a skit and presentation working with Clemens Vasters and Rafal Lukawiecki.  I am really excited about this session as we hope to motivate the perspectives of the Suit (the businessman), the Nerd (the technologist), and the Fortune Teller (the architectural visionary).  I get to play the Fortune Teller!!

This promises to be a fun way to end the TechEd week by providing some thought provoking perspectives on the trends towards SOA.

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