The Freak Parade

Rob Eamon has offered some compelling, well cited arguments (corrections?) in regards to a previous post of mine describing the image of SOA as a city/society that I selected from among various alternatives to use as a mental model. See the comments of that post for a full record of his take on things.

I can’t help but wonder, though, assuming his understanding is the original understanding, that the original “scope independent” definition he has laid out for the term SOA is mutating or fracturing into a different meaning, or more probably collection of meanings, as the concept is becoming more and more mainstream. Perhaps the mutation, if is real, is fueled by relative “laymen” from such out of the way places as the SMB (such as myself) as we attempt to understand SOA and become practitioners, which perhaps wasn’t common until more recently.

Or perhaps I say that entirely defensively, not wanting to believe I could have missed the mark by such a large margin.

In any case, I certainly have no other option than to concede that I was incorrect in my naive belief that I had found for myself a way of thinking about SOA that, at least in a purely conceptual fashion, could exist at an abstract level above all the tumultuous debate.

Perhaps believing in an image of SOA that encompasses all possible schools is as foolish as believing in an image of god that includes all other religions. I never get used to how much technology feels like religion to me at times.

Maybe things would be more straightforward for everyone if there were named schools of thought one could subscribe to, and then it wouldn’t be so tempting to say “This, well THIS is SOA, and that, well that is something that may resemble SOA(maybe), but in fact it is nothing of the sort.” Rather I could just say “I am a Soascopist” and you could say “I am a Soastylist” and, like religion, an argument about which is right would inevitably continue to rage. But, when the uninitiated like myself walk into a room of people shouting different definitions over each others heads, we would clearly know we needed to pick a school, learn the dogma and start shouting back, or we could state ourselves as agnostics, but we would be less inclined to try and synthesize the “truth” from all of the various contradictory opinions, which turns out to be a rather futile effort.

Then, when the holy war breaks out (and perhaps it already has), the SoaScopists, the SoaStylists and all other various sects of Soaists will take up arms together beneath a common standard and ally themselves against the RPCists. Gifted with superior agility, close strategic and financial alignment with the emperor, and extraordinarily loose coupling, the Soasists will relegate RPC to the level of an outcast technology, kept on life support on the outskirts of the kingdom via a flimsy service adapter, until some data center technician coldly pulls the plug, changes a value in a routing table, and the lights go out for good.

Of course, however it shakes out, we’ll still always prostate ourselves before the dollar, one way or another.

Amen.

(BTW, the holy war is just a joke, not my new personal metaphor for the relationship between SOA and RPC)

I haven’t paid much attention to Google Charts so far, but I have enjoyed Stephen Few’s “Bullet Graphs.” A bullet graph is an extremely condensed sort of bar chart that shows the current value of a KPI, and various ranges such as unacceptable, acceptable and target, and an optional indicator line that can mean several things. Anyway, here is an example of a bullet chart (from wikipedia):

This blog post referenced below was referenced in Stephen Few’s blog this morning and describes the several easy steps required to create a bullet graph using the Google API. Being able to easily throw these things up, ad hoc, in any web page is pretty phenomenal, if you ask me. The image below is actually a Google Graph:

Here is the link to the guide:

DEALER DIAGNOSTICS » Blog Archive » Create Bullet Graphs with Google Charts in 7 Easy Steps