I keep bugging Greg about better
folder hierarchy support in NewsGator.
While I have some news feeds directly under my news folder (Don
Box,
Dilbert, my
dad) I categorize most of my feeds
into subfolders. One subfolder is for MSFT architects – my teammates,
Michael,
Keith &
Kevin among others. That folder is
where I typically start reading, esp. when I’m a week behind.
After a long absence, both Pat and
John are blogging again. Pat’s been
busy working on his new
talks
that he will be presenting at TechEd Amsterdam. We will be taping them
for inclusion in the Architecture Strategy
Series. He’s
got a surprise planned for the end of his Metropolis overview talk
(GNLARC) that I’m in charge of getting up on the web as soon as possible
after it happens…watch this space…
John has written two pieces – on
SOA and
smart
clients.
John’s amped about the
SCAG
and he blogs about his smart client thoughts. I liked his observation
that building browser-based apps “is all about service provider ease of
delivery” while smart clients are “all about service consumer ease of
use”. Today, ease of delivery wins out over ease of use, but I wonder
how long that will last.
However interesting John’s views on smart clients are, I typically have
long conversations with him about the finer points of SOA. A
conversation that starts with “Got a sec?” typically turns into an
extended discussion with crowded whiteboards. What I’ve realized
recently is that John and I tend to approach a topic very differently.
John is very pragmatic, so he tends to disagree with my more radical
opinions (such as the endangered middle
tier)
which aren’t really feasible in the short term. I, on the other hand,
start from a desired state and work backwards, trying to figure out what
short term investments will lead to the long-term ideas. I used to think
John and I disagreed about the desirable granularity of services. What
it turns out is that we agree about what we want, but he focused on the
fact we can’t feasibly build fine-grained services in the short term
while I glossed over that fact and thought about what we needed to make
fine-grained services feasible in the long term. Neither viewpoint is
right or wrong, in fact they are very complementary. John keeps me
grounded in reality while I push the limits of his event horizon. Among
the recent topics of debate:
- How fine grained should services be?
- Should customers be thinking about building domain specific
languages?
- How will the role of the ISV’s and SI’s evolve?
- How much of a typical enterprise should be outsourced?
- Is a service-oriented architecture more data-centric or
process-centric?
- What would a requirements modeling language look like?
- What is the most important criteria for evaluating software systems
for the enterprise?
Keep it up, John.