Saturday, June 04, 2005
Are we constantly re-inventing the wheel?
If you have been in the IT field for a while you would either have felt this yourself or heard someone else complain about this. After all, isn't web services just CORBA re-invented? Isn't the software as a service just mainframe service bureaus? The answer is NO. Though it is easy to spot the similarities, the fundamental difference is most times the newer technologies run on a different "stack". This enables a new class of problems to be solved much more elegantly. To give an analogy, if you came up with a car that runs on milk, you would ofcourse, need to design the brakes, steering etc. which may be similar to gasoline driven cars. However, the fact that the new car runs on milk imposes a new set of constraints (and opens up new set of opportunities) in the way these other ancillary systems are designed and over time influences the larger ecosystem (e.g. fuel pumps, repair shops etc.)
I have written (along with Sanjay Patil of SAP Labs) a couple of articles in Web Services Journal on the differences between older distributed component models like CORBA and Web Services. There are also a few new books out there - like the one from Eric Newcomer and Greg Lomow (SOA & Web Services) and Enterprise SOA by Dirk Slama which have a good exposition on this topic.
If you have been in the IT field for a while you would either have felt this yourself or heard someone else complain about this. After all, isn't web services just CORBA re-invented? Isn't the software as a service just mainframe service bureaus? The answer is NO. Though it is easy to spot the similarities, the fundamental difference is most times the newer technologies run on a different "stack". This enables a new class of problems to be solved much more elegantly. To give an analogy, if you came up with a car that runs on milk, you would ofcourse, need to design the brakes, steering etc. which may be similar to gasoline driven cars. However, the fact that the new car runs on milk imposes a new set of constraints (and opens up new set of opportunities) in the way these other ancillary systems are designed and over time influences the larger ecosystem (e.g. fuel pumps, repair shops etc.)
I have written (along with Sanjay Patil of SAP Labs) a couple of articles in Web Services Journal on the differences between older distributed component models like CORBA and Web Services. There are also a few new books out there - like the one from Eric Newcomer and Greg Lomow (SOA & Web Services) and Enterprise SOA by Dirk Slama which have a good exposition on this topic.
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