Happy New Year! Asynchronicity is busting out all over the web and my prediction is that 2010 will be the year of “events”:
- Of course Twitter has brought The concept of publish/subscribe messaging to the masses and we enjoyed their journey of discovery to the heights of scalability in 2009.
- XMPP has been embraced by the real-time web crowd, most publicly in Google Wave but also in other “back-web” contexts such as Gnip.
- Web sockets is an experimental feature of HTML 5 which enables push messages directly to web pages.
- New frameworks for event-driven programming are emerging such as EventMachine, Twisted, Node.js.
- In 2009 every major software vendor had a CEP product.
In the meantime, SOA has become so damn synchronous. But it doesn’t have to be!
One of the fundamental tennets of SOA is that reducing coupling between systems makes them more scalable, reliable and agile (easier to change). SOA goes a long way to reducing coupling by providing a contract-based, platform independent mechanism for service providers and consumers to cooperate. However I still think we can improve on current SOA practices in further reducing coupling.
Coupling still intrudes into many aspects of how SOA is practiced today:
- HTTP transports tie us to a regimen of synchronous request-reply with timeouts which creates tight couplings between provider and consumer. Even though one-way MEPs were an original feature of SOAP, message-oriented transports remain the forgotten orphan of web-services standards.
- Many SOA services are conceived, implemented and maintained as point-to-point entities…providers and consumers forced into lock-step due to inadequate versioning and lifecycle management.
- Process orchestration layers often form a bridge between service providers and consumers, which on the face of it provides some level of indirection. But in many cases orchestration provides limited value and may actually serve to increase the overall system coupling.
In many cases we can achieve the benefits of service orientation to much greater effect by exercising a little scepticism toward some of these shibboleths of the web services world and embracing a more asynchronous, event-oriented way of building processes. So this year, embrace your asynchronous side and do something to reduce your system coupling: build some pub/sub services, learn about Event Processing or Event-Driven Architecture, try one of the technologies I pointed to above.
Just as developers should embrace multiple languages to broaden their skills, so should architects embrace and be fluent in multiple architectural styles.
2 comments ↓
An oldie… why starbucks doesn’t use two-phase commit.
http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/docs/IEEE_Software_Design_2PC.pdf
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