SOA Talk

I’m listening to Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jon Udell, Dana Gardner, and Dan Farber talk about SOA via “The Gillmor Gang” at ITConversations. Herewith some observations on the form and content.

First of all, a transcript would be so much better; I don’t have an hour to listen and if I did it would be in my car, and even if I tried, sitting here in my office (even though the audio is excellent) my attention is continually getting pulled away by email or instant messages or red letters in NetNewsWire or whatever. If I’m writing code or a tricky position paper or reading something material or even just thinking about a hard problem I can tune out the distractions no problem, but four guys talking? The mind wanders.

Ouch, now we had a little network glitch and the streaming MP3 blew up 20-odd minutes in, and I guess I could download the MP3 and tune in the rest; we’ll see if that happens.

As to the content: before my attention wandered, there was some very intelligent but honestly puzzled back-and-forth about what “Web Services,” “Services-Oriented Architecture,” and (a new one to me) “Services Fabric” actually mean. I’m really glad that it’s not just me that’s puzzled.

Apparently a recent large-scale survey of professionals revealed that “SOA” has positive buzz and high perceived relevance, while “Web Services” scores very low. Huh?

When the stream blew up, they were talking about best-of-breed vs. single-vendor solutions and if Web Services or SOA or whatever changes that ball game. Interesting stuff, hope I can get back to it.