Contending for Canada Tour Day 2

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Ok – Day 1 wasn’t much... I just got on the plane and got myself to Toronto. I did have a very nice extra long workout in the evening to make up for the many calories I will be consuming this week.

 

Today I presented my favorite talk “Patterns for SO(A)” and once again the talk did very well. We had two sessions with about 40 people in each one. I always learn a thing or two from our customers when I give this talk so I thought I would list some things I learned.

 

Data Consistency Checking

After my “Taking on Texas” tour in August I added a slide that talks about building a data consistency check into your architecture. It seems to me that this is necessary because in a loosely coupled environment the potential for data in-consistency rises dramatically. Because this is a risk we want to build something that can tell me if the data is in a consistent state like checking to see that we don’t have orphaned records and such.

 

One of the architects in today’s session mentioned that while you can check for local consistency, in the enterprise you need to have enterprise consistency but because of the latency of replication and such you will never have completely consistent data. Therefore you have to decide how much inconsistency is tolerable.

 

Good point! I’m definitely going to remember that one.

 

SOA just another CORBA?

One attendee said – isn’t all this SOA stuff just a rehash of CORBA? And what makes us think that this will work?

 

Now at some level of abstraction I guess you could say this but one of the other attendees pointed out that it is not the same. CORBA and COM+ are about sharing objects and that this unit of sharing was the heart of the reason why these distributed technologies failed to provide the kind of integration we look to SOA to provide today.

 

I suppose that you could have implemented SOA like behaviors with COM+ or CORBA but that people often didn’t because of the nature of the technology.

 

At any rate...tomorrow I’m going to be meeting with customers all day in the Toronto area – it should be fun. My quest to be an architect continues...