EDABlog

i am with anil. a call for an epiphany is kind of hard. you ever read any wittgenstein?

"My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)"

this kind of intellectual bootstrapping is an issue. also - how many people ever "got" objects. you are making an argument for a priesthood, not a revolution in software productivity.

i see too much of this from the vast IQs at Redmond. you guys need to understand not everyone is as smart as you are, and not everyone writes the kind of beautiful code you aspire too. You build tools for the masses, not for the geniuses eh.

I do agree you need to make the leap , if you have not build distributed systems before ( remoting , Corba/ RMI or web service) you will not know why it is needed. Too many variables to explain which means you will never convince people.

A bit Like TDD in the OO space ( and OO at first) people just have to try it .


 I wrote this in 2004 ( 5 years ago now !) and i still believe this, jumping to SOA is a leap and unfortunately some people who have not done distributed apps before have to learn through pain . As James rightly points out though many people nevery made the jump to OO which ALSO requires a leap of faith. With OO the industry has different ideas how high to leap .

That being said i think the best thing is to design for the skills of the team !  A small app is probably best represented by 2 Tier database. A large distr. app or SOA environment is going to have people with all varieties of skills.  People with good OO skills can create complicated clients , framework , services etc , people with distributed app experiences can write the contracts , framework and services , VB Procedural programmers can write clients that consume the services.  In all cases because SOA services have a SIMPLE interface ( if designed well) and treat the services information as data all people can use it including different languages. In that sense organisations do not need to standardise as much as earlier . Most importantly people dont need to make the LEAP to SOA they can keep doing what they are comfortable with and willing to learn.  With Distributed Objects you needed a lot of people to have great OO and distributed app skills a pretty big ask  for most organisations. This is a big improvement.