Does my bus look big in this?
I watched QCon presentation from Martin Fowler & Jim Webber over at infoQ (great site) this morning. It’s entertaining, informative, presented by smart people, based on rational judgments but it still smells a bit to me.
They argue very coherently that current ESBs are not the dog danglies (as we would say in england). They do this via an agile manifesto that while comforting to all stuck in corporate hell really fails to address the key point, that enterprise integration/messaging are very very hard, like parallel algorithm hard.
Putting aside the obvious agile agenda here, the root issue for me is that the WS-* and REST camps don’t represent a binary decision. They are extremes upon which we try and map to the simplest but no simpler. It’s hogwash to suggest that a REST model is good enough for anything, it’s just about good enough for web pages and really very little beyond that. It’s equally hogwash to think WS-* is a panacea, it creates as many difficulties as it solves.
The real question is where is the middle ground that is better than both, maybe this really is like parallelization, fundamentally hard with little prospect of a solution, just some pills to take away some of the pain.
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