Day before yesterday I went to a Software Development Event in my hometown Ede. It was organized by the Software Development Network. I went to the following sessions:
In between there was lunch and I met Paul Gielens an old colleague, buddy I worked with at Interpolis. He was also a speaker for the session An Introduction to Domain-Driven Design. We had a nice chat for over an hour. All sessions I saw, where good ones especially the first one. Speaker Thaddy de Koning, who is an architect, development manager for ALEX a Dutch Online Stockbroker. His talk was about a high performance, high available systems, which one needs if online stock trading is done. He outlined their website and services that are used to provide all sorts of information. His vision of SOA is that services are doing something and it is not about How (like OO), or why (services have no identity) and technology agnostic. Heart or core of SOA is loosely coupling, interoperability, defined interfaces and contract. Reusability is at macro level. It can be categorized by presentation, business services, data layer and integration layer (messaging). His categorization can be compared with the three part model expose/compose/consume (see my previous post). Stockbroker Alex has a lot of data, customers and transactions; therefore high performance is a must. Same counts for availability, where they try to achieve an availability of 99, 9999%, no downtime, have automatic failure, hot stand by’s and fallback. Services are of a high granularity and all redundant, so if one service fails on one server, the same on another server will take over (automatic failover). Practically Alex has more instances of every service, hosted on more machines (different locations) and implementations (same service other purposes). He also mentioned risks (problems) involving their architecture like security, protocol overhead (they do not use SOAP), communication and third party dependencies. They use https for distribution of data (presentation), TIBCO Rendezvous (messaging), TCP/IP or Named Pipes, limited messages on their bus, fail over of their middleware. It was I must say a very interesting talk about SOA implemented with a complete different technology than Microsoft.
Next talk I went to was Web Client Software Factory done by Pieter de Bruin of Avanade. It was an informational talk about this kind of Software Factory. Information about it can be found at codeplex. He demoed at few things that can be done with it and explained what it is and how it works.
Finally the last talk about SOA now and later done by two people (Reinhard Brongers, Donald Hessing) form VX Company (former employer of mine few years back), which I thought was going about governance and so on, when one has implemented a SOA how will it managed, versioning, service lifecycle. Hence it was more like their talk form DevDays 2006 From SOA to implementation. A lot of that presentation came back this time with more code demo’s and difference in implementation by showing .Net 1.1 and .Net 2.0. They will be doing a track at Developer Days this year about SOA to implementation 3.0 NET. Look at their presentation from last year if you are interested. I will go to DevDays 2007 this year myself with some of my colleagues. Hope to see you there.
Technorati:
SOA
Software AS A Service
Web Client Software Factory
Software Developer Network
