Lhotka on SOA
Rockford Lhotka has a great
post about SOA and his opinions about Indigo and the future. This
is probably the most interesting and informative writing about SOA that I’ve
come across. He talks about SOA and how it uses passive data as opposed to an
objected oriented system where the data is tied to the actions that are
performed on it. He favors the object oriented method, because of the
clean, organized code that it can produce, and the tight coupling of the data
rules to the actual data. I have to agree; by including the functions that
act on the data, with the data, you can easily create a single interface to the
data, rather than have a function library like you would in COBOL. I also
believe that its easier to exhibit the intent of the code when its
been written in an object oriented fashion, making life a little easier on
the person maintaining your code.
SOA seems to be the hip, sexy thing to be into these days,
kind of like how XML was stylish a few years ago, when people would use XML just
to say they used XML. Towards the end of his post, Rockford alludes to “The really cool ideas – the
ones with the power to be emergent”, and how they are not being
recognized, I’d love to see another post going into detail about those cool
ideas.
