Interview: Jim Webber on "Guerilla SOA"

Posted by Stefan Tilkov on Aug 24, 2007

Sections

Architecture & Design,

Enterprise Architecture

Topics

Web Services ,

WS Standards ,

SOA ,

REST

Tags

WSDL ,

MEST ,

SSDL

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).

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   RE: MEST

   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 )

   Reply

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   Links to references

   by Joshua Graham

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

   Reply

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   Seems not that new

   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

   Reply

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   A different approach with difference strenghts and weaknesses

   by Johannes Brodwall

   RPC is highly coupled and often unrobust. On the other hand, message style requires a lot of work to do simple things. The design of a web system that uses a message-oriented style to query a data oriented services is not pretty.
   
   
   
   The danger of RPC style is that we use it to integrate systems that should be decoupled. The danger of messaging style is if we use it to distribute things that really should be colocated. Fowler's first law of distributed computing will always be relevant. Let's stop using shining new tools as an excuse to ignore it.

   Reply

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