Tenthline

Apparently, “SOA” has been declared dead.  The wording is very dramatic and it comes from the blogs of the Burton Group so it’s quite authoritative.  The economy swooped down like a massive meteor and boom, “SOA” went with the rest of the IT dinosaurs.

Except if you read the article, you’ll quickly realize that service-oriented architecture is not dead.  Phew.  You had me worried for a bit there, Anne.  What really died is “SOA”, the enterprise IT buzzword.  Service-oriented architecture is actually a really great idea. This is not surprising as it has been proven in practice by the largest distributed software system in the world: the world wide web.  The explosion of web application mash-ups using web APIs is the best kind of example of why services are such an awesome idea.

The problem with “SOA” was twofold:

1. Service-oriented architecture is not a silver bullet (nothing is) but like any new architecture/design buzzword, it got marketed as one and the vendors quickly jumped on the bandwagon to provide “SOA” products.  As Anne points out in her article, the technology behind service-oriented architecture largely got in the way of the core idea.
2. Embracing service-oriented architecture is not as simple as buying a product and embarking on a quick (re-)integration project.  It requires completely re-thinking the way you approach enterprise software architecture.

And so, “SOA” joins the legacy of IT buzzwords that have been bludgeoned to death by hype and marketing. But what makes this death a particularly sad one is that “SOA” didn’t die because of its lack of technical merit; it died because it was misunderstood.  And so I too take a moment of silence to honor the memory of “SOA” with the rest of the enterprise IT community.

We’re all back in the office and hard at work after enjoying the winter holidays. It’s a new year and with a new year comes resolutions. One of mine is to blog more. Admittedly this blog hasn’t been getting much love, especially when I’m busy with project work. So I resolve to write more for the company blog and to encourage others at Tenthline to contribute their writing as well.

Happy New Year, everyone! Here’s to hoping that 2009 is awesome!

Just in time for the holidays, I received an e-mail informing me that Alfresco 3.0 Service Pack 1 is now available for download.

Happy holidays from Tenthline! We’ll be back in the New Year to continue delivering content and identity management solutions to all of you! =)

I’ve created a very simple web page at http://enricob.github.com/ (enricob is my username on GitHub).  It lists some of the things that I’m currently working on along with a bit of information about myself.  It’s not incredibly remarkable, except for one small detail: it is managed in GitHub as a remote git repository. This is a new feature from GitHub that is described in detail here.

I created a GitHub project called enricob.github.com and pushed a local master branch to it. There’s only one file at the moment, index.html. Within about 10 minutes, the site was active and the page could be seen by going to the URL above.  You can see the GitHub project page by going to http://github.com/enricob/enricob.github.com.

This alone is pretty nifty but there’s one more neat feature that I haven’t been able to take advantage of yet: managing pages for other projects and anchoring them on the domain.  For example, if I were to create a GitHub project called sample, create a branch called gh-pages, and push the web page files to that branch, it would become available at http://enricob.github.com/sample. This is really cool!

The more I use GitHub, the more I understand how it is so much different from sites like SourceForge.  GitHub isn’t just a collection of open source projects and their pages: it is social networking with code.  Find a bit of time to try Git and GitHub: you won’t regret it.  =)

I’ve just upgraded our WordPress installation to 2.7. I must say that I’m impressed with what they’ve done with the back-end interface. I wish I could upgrade The Japanese Learner as well but compatibility with PodPress is holding me back from making any upgrades there.

I’m writing this post using the new “QuickPress” feature, which gives a way of quickly writing up an article. Quite a nifty feature for the dashboard.