Are Proxies Good Enough?
I have taken to the habit of watching tech videos like the .Net Show on my laptop
while I am on the treadmill in the mornings. There are a host of other vlogs (video
blogs) out there to choose from, too. I have been walking back in time a bit and I
just got to October 12, 2004.
Having just returned from VS Live and a one day Indigo immersion workshop lead by
Aaron Skonnard, I am still pretty hyped about Indigo. In this episode Don Box and
Doug Purdy talk about Indigo in the same ways that are being presented about Indigo
today.
Don covers the 4 cardinal rules service architectures:
- Boundaries are explicit
- Services are autonomous
- Services share contract, not class
- Service compatibility is determined with policy
Understanding these tenants of SOA is instrumental in truly getting the messaging
layer of Indigo. For more on this idea, check out this
article by Don. One comment that I made to Aaron at the end of workshop is that
it seems that the harder Don and crew work to abstract the XML messaging of Indigo
services from us, the harder people who teach it (like Aaron) have to work to convince
developers that it is just XML messaging.
On the Other Hand
The abstraction layer is wonderfully valuable. Typical enterprise developers (old
VB6 folks) simply don’t care. Working with the proxy objects suffices just fine, thank
you very much. There are those who really want to know how it works, and then there
are those who just cobble it all together. Regardless of your philosophical view of
all of this, there are developers who simply need to write reports against the CRM,
or whatever the marketing team wants. Those folks can use the proxy layers in happy
ignorance. Will they ever be architects? No.
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