I took a hiatus last month with the interview, but we’re back now. We are continuing my series of interviews with CSD thought leaders and this month we are having a little chat with Jesus Rodriguez. Jesus is a Microsoft MVP, blogger, Oracle ACE, chief architect at Tellago, and a prolific speaker. If you follow Jesus’ blog, then you know that he always seems to be ahead of the curve with technology and can be counted on for thoughtful insight.
Let’s see how he handles the wackiness of Seroter’s Four Questions.
Q: You recently published a remarkably extensive paper on BAM. Did you learn anything new during the creation of this paper, and what do you think about the future of BAM from Microsoft?
A: Writing an extensive paper is always a different experience. I am sure you are familiar with that feeling given that these days you are really busy authoring a book. A particular characteristic of our BAM whitepaper is the diversity of the target audience. For instance, while there are sections that are targeting the typical BizTalk audience, others are more intended to a developer that is really deep with WCF-WF and yet others sections are completely centered on Business Intelligence topics. I think I learned a lot in terms of how to structure content that targets a largely diverse audience without confusing everybody. I am not sure we accomplish that goal but we certainly tried 😉
I think BAM is one of the most appealing technologies of the BizTalk Server family. In my opinion, in the next releases, we should expect BAM to evolve beyond being a BizTalk-centric technology to become a mainstream infrastructure for tracking and representing near real time business information. Certainly the WCF-WF BAM interceptors in BizTalk R2 were a step on that direction but there are a lot of other things that need to be done. Specifically, BAM should gravitate towards a more integrated model with the different Microsoft’s Business Intelligence technologies such as the upcoming Gemini. Also, having interoperable and consistent APIs is a key requirement to extend the use of BAM to non Microsoft technologies. That’s why the last chapter of our paper proposes a BAM RESTful API that I believe could be one of the channels for enhancing the interoperability of BAM solutions.
Q: You spoke at SOA World late last year and talked about WS* and REST in the enterprise. What sorts of enterprise applications/scenarios are strong candidates for REST services as opposed to WS*/SOAP services and why?
A: Theoretically, everything that can be modeled as a resource-oriented operation is a great candidate for a RESTful model. In that category we can include scenarios like exposing data from databases or line of business systems. Now, practically speaking, I would use a RESTful model over a SOAP/WS-* alternative for almost every SOA scenario in particular those that require high levels of scalability, performance and interoperability. WS-* still has a strong play for implementing capabilities such as security, specifically for trust and federation scenarios, but even there I think we are going to see RESTful alternatives that leverages standards like OpenID, OAuth and SAML in the upcoming months. Other WS-* protocols such as WS-Discovery are still very relevant for smart device interfaces.
In the upcoming years, we should expect to see a stronger adoption of REST especially after the release the JSR 311 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=311 ) which is going to be fully embraced by some of the top J2EE vendors such as Sun, IBM and Oracle.
Q: What is an example of a “connected system” technology (e.g. BizTalk/WCF/WF) where a provided GUI or configuration abstraction shields developers from learning a technology concept that might actually prove beneficial?
A: There are good examples of configuration abstractions in these three technologies (BizTalk, WCF and WF). Given the diversity of its feature set, WCF hides a lot of things behind its configuration that could be very useful on some situations. For instance, each time we configure a specific binding on a service endpoint we are indicating the WCF runtime the configuration of ten or twelve components such as encoders, filters, formatters or inspectors that are required in order to process a message. Knowing those components and how to customize them allows developers to optimize the behavior of the WCF runtime to specific scenarios.
Q [stupid question]: Many of us have just traveled to Seattle for the Microsoft MVP conference. This year they highly encouraged us to grab a roommate instead of residing in separate rooms. I’ve been told that one way to avoid conference roommates is to announce during registration some undesirable characteristic that makes you an lousy roommate choice. For instance, I could say that I have a split personality and that my alter ego is a nocturnal, sexually-confused 15th century sea pirate with a shocking disregard for the personal space of others. Bam, single room. Give us a (hopefully fictitious) characteristic that could guarantee you a room all to yourself.
A: My imaginary friend is a great Opera singer 🙂 We normally practice signing duets after midnight and sometimes we spend all night rehearsing one or two songs. We are really looking have our MVP roommate as our audience and, who knows, maybe we can even try a three-voice song.
Seriously now, given work reasons I had to cancel my attendance to the MVP summit but I am sure you guys (BizTalk MVP gang) had a great time and drove your respective roommates crazy 😉
As always, I had fun with this one. Hopefully Jesus can say the same.
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