InfoQ

News

Interview: Jim Webber on "Guerilla SOA"

Posted by Stefan Tilkov on Aug 24, 2007 04:56 AM

Community
SOA
Topics
WS Standards,
Web Services
Tags
REST,
WSDL,
SSDL,
MEST
In this interview Jim Webber, Service-oriented Systems Practice Lead at ThoughtWorks, explains his ideas behind "Guerilla SOA" – a somewhat agile approach to SOA that relies on small steps instead of a large-middleware-centric route towards service-enabling an enterprise. Jim also advocates MEST (MESsage Transfer), an architectural style that focuses on messages the same way REST focuses on resources. In Jim's opinion, the problem with most current Web services stacks are rooted in WSDL's notion of operations, which he deems to be the wrong abstraction for SOA.

Watch the full interview (24 minutes).

3 comments

Reply

RE: MEST by Jan Vegt Posted Aug 25, 2007 4:43 PM
Links to references by Joshua Graham Posted Aug 28, 2007 3:22 PM
Seems not that new by Stefano Pogliani Posted Sep 8, 2007 6:22 PM
  1. Back to top

    RE: MEST

    Aug 25, 2007 4:43 PM by Jan Vegt

    Based on experiences in SOA projects for the past few years as a Business/EAI/Data architect I am very impressed with the MEST idea. In the excellent interview with Anne Thomas Manes a few weeks ago here on InfoQ almost everything she said made a lot sense (in reference to my own experience) apart from one thing: this central notion and importance of type. Personally I think the MEST approach is a convincing answer. Thanks very much for publishing this interview, Jan ( Jan Vegt, 42, The Netherlands )

  2. Back to top

    Links to references

    Aug 28, 2007 3:22 PM by Joshua Graham

    My blog entry about this interview includes links to some of the sites and people Jim mentioned. http://grahamis.com/blog/2007/08/25/soa-101/

  3. Back to top

    Seems not that new

    Sep 8, 2007 6:22 PM by Stefano Pogliani

    What you describe here resembles very much to: 1. ebXML, for the message-oriented framework with Business Messages focus 2. WSCI, as a way to describe long-running conversations Where are the differences between what you describve here and what I pointed out? Thanks a lot Regards /Stefano

Exclusive Content

Tapestry for Nonbelievers

A new article by I. Drobiazko and R. Zubairov introduces v. 5 of the Apache Tapestry component-oriented web framework. The tutorial shows how to create a component and covers IoC in Tapestry and Ajax.

Pete Lacey on REST and Web Services

In this interview, Burton Group consultant Pete Lacey talks to Stefan Tilkov about his disillusionment with SOAP, his opinion on REST, and addresses some of the perceived shortcomings REST vs. WS-*.

Business Natural Languages Development in Ruby

Jay Fields presents his concept of Business Natural Languages - a type of Domain Specific Languages geared towards being readable by domain experts.

Distributed Version Control Systems: A Not-So-Quick Guide Through

Adoption and interest for Distributed Version Control Systems is constantly rising. We will introduce the concept of DVCS and have a look at 3 actors in the area: git, Mercurial and Bazaar.

Segundo Velasquez and Agile as Seen Through the Customer's Eyes

Deborah Hartmann interviewed Segundo Velasquez about his experience as customer with an Agile team during the initial phase of software design of a product.

Fine Grained Versioning with ClickOnce

David Cooksey shows how to fine grained versioning to a ClickOnce deployment using an HttpHandler written with ASP.NET, making partial rollouts to a test audience much easier.

Implementing Manual Activities in Windows Workflow

Windows workflow (WF) is an excellent framework for implementing business processes, but lacks support for human activities. This article describes a completely generic approach for changing this.

Markus Voelter about Software Architecture Documentation

In this interview taken during OOPSLA 2007, Markus Voelter talks about the importance of documenting the software architecture, and gives some good and also bad examples on how it could be done.