Santosh Benjamin

DAY 3 - More SOA and BTS and some Myth Busting

Today had more SOA and BTS stuff

SOA : Attended the Thomson Case Study on SOA implementation. Interesting but really nothing out of the ordinary. Still its a good case study for Smart Clients and a decent reference implementation. Noted that they used INFRAGISTICS for the rich componentry both on the web as well as the smart client. It seemed that they managed to use MVC well enough to plug in a web view over the same Model and Controller. Now how did they manage that? AFAIK , even in the UIPAB2 , the controller is tied to the view so you just cant remove the web page and put a thicker client in its place - and only the MODEL can be considered re-usable. This is what a colleague's experience is, unless of course he did it all wrong which I doubt. Can anyone shed some light?

I also went for the PROSEWARE session in the afternoon. As expected, Clement V did a great job. Highly technical stuff but very well delivered. I hope Microsoft releases the code and documentation. It would be awesome. Learnt a really cool thing about versioning. We need to ensure that we only pass 'types' as parameters into the messages. This helps in versioning because by controlling the serialisation with XmlAnyAttribute and XmlAnyElement, we can add even more elements in future without breaking existing consumers.

One thing which really fascinated me was how he placed all the XSD's into one project and then in the pre-build stage he used the XSD exe to generate the corresponding types in C sharp. I didnt catch the explanation, he was too quick, but i think the reason is as follows: Since we are passing types around, one way would be to create the corresponding classes in the project and compile them all. But this has a problem in that everyime someone makes a change in the XSD, they also need to go and change the corresponding class. Keeping these in sync would be a beast. Instead we can keep the XSD in the project and then generate the code when we need to. Now, the consumers of this class will have to point to a DLL anyway, so the code generated at build time will be available there and they can easily use them.

Isnt this simply amazing!!! (Or have i got it all horribly wrong? Maybe I should post a question on his blog)

There was even more from Clement in the last session of the day when he dealt with Handling State at multiple layers. He used PROSEWARE as example and there were some valuable pointers. That chap should write a book on Architecture. Insights into his approach would be invaluable for budding architects (and wannabes like myself !!) A key takeaway for me was that I need to start looking into Enterprise Services. I've ignored them for far too long.

BTS: Attended the BTS HOL for Orchestration, or rather, i skipped the 10:15 to 11:30 session cos I couldnt locate anything really interesting and did the lab instead. I also went for the Advanced Business Processes in BTS (or as Scott said, Essential Biz Processes). It was top class. He dealt in depth with Correlations, Compositions, Convoys, Direct Binding. He had very little time to demonstrate Transactions and Role Links which was a pity. But it was an amazing session.

One annoying thing I picked up at the end in the Q&A is that HWS is a lean offering now and they would rather we worked with one of their partners if we needed workflow. Appreciate that TeamPlate and K2 etc are offering good products, but this was the kind of thing that put me off when i was forced to use that awful product CMS2002 sometime ago. Keeping important functionality out of a core product just so that partners can make money isnt a good idea IMHO. More power to TeamPlate and K2 though, but i doubt my client will pay extra for that. I have a hard time making the case for BTS right now.

MYTH BUSTING: This was a panel discussion. Not much time now to post all the details. Im sure someone else will blog it anyway. Or i'll do it when I get home at the weekend. Suffice to say that David Chappell, Clement, Juval, Rafael and Michelle are very knowledgeable and funny too.

So thats it from me at Day 3 (day 4 if you take the pre-conference). One more day to go. Probably wont have enough time to post tomorrow evening since I will be rushing off to the airport.