2008/5/24 Alexander Johannesen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 9:25 PM, Steve Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I find it interesting that back in 2003 most SOA groups talked about >> Web Services and technical implementation and now 5 years on we are >> talking about the harder problems of organisational and cultural >> change, while REST is back again at the way to build a better wheel. > > Actually, I persist with REST exactly because it has a number of > things that makes it easier to adopt to more human problems. Resource > orientation being one (closer to the human perception of "things"),
So its OO then? This sort of thinking works well in the small (which is where things are) but badly in the large. Focus on resources is NOT what people do in large organisations where the focus is on the organisational elements than on the specifics under management. Put it this way an army is not a collection of independent resources that are managed individually, it is the overall unified control and management of the resources that gives the army its strength. > the limited interface another (humans have limited interfaces, too :), Nope humans have very complex and rich interfaces with multiple ways of interpreting information, its hard to think of a human interface that is idempotent for instance. > and finally the state of application through hyperlinks (which is > horrible to explain, terrible to spell out, but has a grounded human > essence in it; the angle of bias and scope directly there with the > "thing" itself). How is that grounded in human essence? I'm really struggling with that. > > To do SOA on a organizational / human level I find that since people > can grok the human aspects of REST I get a free shot at actual finding > solutions with them rather than trying so damn hard to separate SOA > and implementation, because, you know, people don't really think like > that. The world is complex, but we humans handle complexity through > adapting to patters, not by breaking it down into bits and > categorizing it. You are kidding aren't you? People don't break problems down into bits and categorise them? This is the planet of countries, governments, religions, races, sports, technologies and every other form of categorisation that you could think of finding. One of human's greatest skills is the ability to break problems into its constituent parts and thus be able to solve the problem in chunks rather than having to solve everything in one go (in fact the Church Turing thesis effectively says that all problems work like that). > >> The on going problem of IT is that people continue to think that a >> technology will deliver a massive step change in the success, >> maintainability and evolution of IT estates. Don't you find it >> depressing? I do. > > Oh, it's a bet one way or the other. Sometimes technology do bring the > goods, other times it does not. No technology EVER has delivered a multiple increase in performance in IT. >The thing is, in the end, it's not the > technology with the best technical design that wins, but the > technology that connects best with the people who will use it. I think the connection is more the other way around (and important distinction). Technologies are just tools, people use them as they see fit. Steve > > Alex > -- > ---------------------------------------------------------- > Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps > ------------------------------------------ http://shelter.nu/blog/ -------- >
