Great minds think alike, or so it would appear :-).
Just a month after we published our article "Life above the Service Tier" describing SOFEA (Service-Oriented Front-End Architecture), Nolan Wright and Jeff Haynie have proposed an architecture they call SOUI (Service-Oriented User Interface). (Independently, Roger Voss blogged that web frameworks are peaking towards obsolescence.)
It's worth repeating what we said in the Conclusion section of our paper:
"Although it seems presumptuous on our part to claim that we have “solved” the end-to-end integration problem, what is probably true is that recent paradigms and technology breakthroughs have brought the SOFEA model closer to conceptualisation, and someone or the other was bound to suggest it. It happened to be us."
Well, clearly not just us. Many others are saying the same thing.
Matt Raible wondered if there was any difference between the two frameworks (SOFEA and SOUI). SOUI proponents Nolan and Jeff haven't just proposed a theoretical architecture, they've actually created a set of tools to help developers build to this model, and what's more, this set of tools is available for Java, PHP, Ruby and .NET. It's called Appcelerator, and it's a pretty impressive piece of work.
Examining Appcelerator (and it would be a fair assumption that this is what Nolan and Jeff intend SOUI to look like), it appears to satisfy all the conditions that we proposed for SOFEA, except one.
SOFEA emphasises the use of XML for Data Interchange, because one of its guiding principles is to mesh seamlessly with the service tier. Services may be built using either the REST paradigm or the SOAP messaging paradigm, but XML plays a big role in either one. SOAP requires, and REST recommends, the use of XML for Data Interchange. XML has the essential characteristic of being able to enforce data integrity (i.e., conformance to specified data structures, data types and data constraints). That's why we make a big deal about XML support in SOFEA. We considered but rejected JSON because it's only slightly better than raw HTML-over-HTTP in these respects.
Appcelerator uses JSON, not XML. So that seems to be the big difference between the two models. SOFEA requires the use of XML for Data Interchange. SOUI prefers the more lightweight JSON.
I guess Nolan and Jeff have made a valid architectural choice favouring ease-of-use over data integrity, but better XML tooling may blunt that advantage in future.
Incidentally, Ye Zhang made a comment about SOFEA on Matt Raible's blog to the effect that we seemed to be chasing buzzwords and hence tacked on the "Service-Oriented" prefix to our model. Not true. Service-Orientation is at the heart of our model, because we approached the Presentation Tier from that angle. Our emphasis on XML as the Data Interchange mechanism for SOFEA was designed to enable the Presentation Tier to interoperate with the Service Tier with no impedance mismatch at all.
At any rate, the software industry seems to be at the start of a new era, and I'm happy we were able to make a contribution to the debate.
Just a month after we published our article "Life above the Service Tier" describing SOFEA (Service-Oriented Front-End Architecture), Nolan Wright and Jeff Haynie have proposed an architecture they call SOUI (Service-Oriented User Interface). (Independently, Roger Voss blogged that web frameworks are peaking towards obsolescence.)
It's worth repeating what we said in the Conclusion section of our paper:
"Although it seems presumptuous on our part to claim that we have “solved” the end-to-end integration problem, what is probably true is that recent paradigms and technology breakthroughs have brought the SOFEA model closer to conceptualisation, and someone or the other was bound to suggest it. It happened to be us."
Well, clearly not just us. Many others are saying the same thing.
Matt Raible wondered if there was any difference between the two frameworks (SOFEA and SOUI). SOUI proponents Nolan and Jeff haven't just proposed a theoretical architecture, they've actually created a set of tools to help developers build to this model, and what's more, this set of tools is available for Java, PHP, Ruby and .NET. It's called Appcelerator, and it's a pretty impressive piece of work.
Examining Appcelerator (and it would be a fair assumption that this is what Nolan and Jeff intend SOUI to look like), it appears to satisfy all the conditions that we proposed for SOFEA, except one.
SOFEA emphasises the use of XML for Data Interchange, because one of its guiding principles is to mesh seamlessly with the service tier. Services may be built using either the REST paradigm or the SOAP messaging paradigm, but XML plays a big role in either one. SOAP requires, and REST recommends, the use of XML for Data Interchange. XML has the essential characteristic of being able to enforce data integrity (i.e., conformance to specified data structures, data types and data constraints). That's why we make a big deal about XML support in SOFEA. We considered but rejected JSON because it's only slightly better than raw HTML-over-HTTP in these respects.
Appcelerator uses JSON, not XML. So that seems to be the big difference between the two models. SOFEA requires the use of XML for Data Interchange. SOUI prefers the more lightweight JSON.
I guess Nolan and Jeff have made a valid architectural choice favouring ease-of-use over data integrity, but better XML tooling may blunt that advantage in future.
Incidentally, Ye Zhang made a comment about SOFEA on Matt Raible's blog to the effect that we seemed to be chasing buzzwords and hence tacked on the "Service-Oriented" prefix to our model. Not true. Service-Orientation is at the heart of our model, because we approached the Presentation Tier from that angle. Our emphasis on XML as the Data Interchange mechanism for SOFEA was designed to enable the Presentation Tier to interoperate with the Service Tier with no impedance mismatch at all.
At any rate, the software industry seems to be at the start of a new era, and I'm happy we were able to make a contribution to the debate.
No comments:
Post a Comment