SOA BOF - links and thoughts

I had a small but useful BOF on SOA at Access 2006.  Thanks to Glen Newton for posting the BOF, via the magic of blog communication, and thanks to Alison for trying out the nano-BOF-introduction idea I suggested.

Anyway, here are some SOA starting points, from my participation in an SOA Symposium last year

• bookmarks - http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/soasym2005
• presentation - Service-Oriented Architecture Methods to develop Networked Library Services (PowerPoint)
• video - me doing the presentation (RealVideo)

In terms of my thoughts, I think it's great that Access brings together people from so many different perspectives and backgrounds, all with some connection to library technology - this is silo-breaking as it's meant to happen, but that is also a tremendous challenge.  We have people who come to coding through a formal CS background, people who come to it from a lifelong interest in hacking, people who arrive at it through scripting, and people who manage coders without having ever written code.  That's a really diverse range of backgrounds to try to address.  I think there is a balance between "just getting it done" and some of the higher-level structures and concepts that can be provided by software engineering.  I will have more to say about this when I do a posting about my Friday afternoon "SOA / Web Services / Lego / BPEL / Framework" presentation.

My colleague Stephen Anthony was as always helpful during the BOF and during other discussions, in particular he pointed out to me that I need to find some better terminology for "rapid but non-architecturally-guided" development.  I had been using "Agile" as a shorthand, but to most people that means the (excellent and used by CISTI) concepts of Agile software development.

The following previous posting will lead you to links for all the SOA Symposium videos and presentations: March 13, 2006 - video from Manitoba SOA Symposium.

Comments

[Peter Murray]

Thanks for posting the summary, Richard! I like your observation about 'just getting it done' and take a step back to look at the architecture of what one wants to get done. As one with a CS background, sometimes I think we collectively suffer from too much of the former and not enough of the latter. I'm looking forward to reading a summary of your presentation.