World Wide Webber - Positive Reflections on QCon SOA Track

Posted: 10 November 2007 @ 14:29 UT from San Francisco, US
Last updated: 12 November 2007 @ 16:01 UT

So many times when I've attended conferences with "SOA" in the agenda have I been disappointed by the sheer amount of "blah blah blah" that has crept into the content. This year's second QCon conference in San Francisco had an SOA track which was anything but "blah blah blah." Over the course of the day Stefan Tilkov presided over Steve Vinoski, Sanjiva Weerawarana, Pete Lacey, and Dan Diephouse, as they belted out some of the most intensely interesting and intelligent talks on Web Services and Web-based services that I have been privileged to hear.

In the audience the like of Stu Charlton, Glen Daniels, Patrick Logan, and (from time to time) Martin Fowler and my other ThoughtWorks buddies Josh Graham, Chad Wathington, Ola Bini really upped the ante with seriously good questioning and input into the very open-format talks.

The fact that WSDL was singled out as the single most harmful technology ever was probably the most refreshing theme of the day even though poor Sanjiva took quite a bashing over it. I felt so bad about the WSDL-bashing I did in my talk that it turns out that I promised to hug him later, in a Borat style. Of course I did this publicly at the end of my talk :-)

My talk on Web Services and Web-based services (that whole MEST and REST thing) seemed to have been reasonably well received though I'm sure it was mostly my South Park graphics and Eric Cartman impressions that won the crowd over. Or that I said the word "porn" a few times, that also seems to help in a geek crowd. Technically I got good feedback from Glen that the Starbucks Web-based workflow was a good way of demonstrating how services might be engineered in a Web-centric way.

I'm not sure that InfoQ will be necessarily posting my video since, as Dan points out, it was pretty much R-rated, but I've uploaded my slides (also in PowerPoint 2003 format) in case you're interested. All in all I am one very happy and enthused camper right now. What a fantastic track at what has turned out to be a fabulous conference. I'm looking forward to London next year!

comments: 4

Comments:

Thanks for publishing the slides in PPT 2003 format as well for one of your talks on QCon. On the QCon site itself I could locate the slides of your Gorilla SOA talk but only in the pptx format.

It would be great if you can publish the slides for the same talk in 2003 PPT format as well.

Thanks,

Venkat.

Posted by Venkat @ 13 November 2007 03:54 UT

#	Hi Venkat, I've done that now. Have a look at http://jim.webber.name/presentations.html Jim Posted by Jim Webber, url @ 13 November 2007 04:09 UT

Went throught the slides about MEST, REST extra. Very good explanation but I wondered where you were leading. Would you suggest that SOAP and REST be merged to gain the strengths (e.g. WS-Security, scalability) from each?

ALso there seem to be 2 groups of WS-* standards. One group focuses on soap headers to add functionality to a message. The other group focuses on performing processes with messages. I wish they used seperate names (WSDM-MOWS and MUWS) is a good example.

Posted by peter foley, email @ 29 November 2007 12:28 UT

Hi Peter,

For MEST and REST I think they are both distinct sensible approaches for building large scale systems. In implementation terms they are clearly disjoint (SOAP and HTTP), but philosophically good MEST and good REST are both about well designed state machines. So it's a case of picking your poison there - choose the one that minimises the gap between you and your domain.

In terms of the WS-* protocols, lots of them end up having out their own "business" messages - e.g. the transaction protocols (the ones I'm most familiar with). There's probably no easy dichotomy between header-only and header-plus-body protocols.

Jim

Posted by Jim Webber, url @ 29 November 2007 10:20 UT