Archive for June, 2006

06.25.06

On borrowed terms

Posted in General Ramblings at 2:05 pm by kkj

A poor freshman student of architecture posted a disappointed comment to my blog entry on “traits of an architect” today, and a few months ago my company Silverbullet was asked what buildings we had on reference, thank you. I guess it must be the pictures of bridges and skyscrapers that lure these unwary souls to our sites. As a quick and probably not-too-effective remedy I have renamed the blog post to “traits of a software architect”, but kept the picture of the bridge between Zealand and Funen … hope that helps a little. Passing that same bridge earlier tonight, this incident got me thinking of the extreme to which the software industry bases its terminology on a borrowed vocabulary.

I mean, last time I checked there was no engine in a Turing machine for a software engineer to lubricate, and although the concept of a dynamic link library may sound cool to the uninitiated, it doesn’t mean that you can borrow books from it. Along the same lines you don’t choose between color or black and white for an image of your harddrive, and the icons of your desktop are not wooden frames with religious pictures, stolen from some backroad in Eastern Europe and carelessly tossed on a heavy oak table, inherited from your late great-grand-uncle. And while we’re at it: Service Oriented Architecture is not a revolutionary new way of designing strip-malls that optimize the customer experience.

Computer science is a very young discipline, which has seen an explosive growth, unprecedented in any other field of technology, and I guess that is what accounts for the vast amount of borrowed terms, with which we build our word-stock: there is no time to come up with new terms, and by the way the whole concept of “building” something as ghostly as software requires a heavy use of analogies if we’re to get the message across to anyone outside the industry.

That said, the fact that we’ve fooled *real* architects twice now, shows that although it is easy to forget that there is a world outside of the computer (which by that way used to mean a person, who performed calculations until the digital revolution kicked in), it is prudent to be precise.

I for one will be prefixing architect with software from now on.

06.23.06

Standardizing SOA

Posted in Presentations, SOA at 2:06 pm by kkj

Phew!

Since April I’ve literally been buried in work, defining a standard SOAP envelope for the Danish Health Sector with MedCom, while at the same time juggling digital signatures in Java on the SOSI project. Thank the higher powers that part of my job was to make these two projects converge! Today I presented our work at MedCom and we received great, positive feedback that won’t require many changes before 1.0 can be published later this summer.

The standard leverages SOAP, SAML, WS-Security, XML Signature, and WS-Utility in combination with the Danish standards, OIO-XML and OCES to define a profile with the following important features:

  • Allows different authentication methods: digital signatures and username/password
  • Defines an envelope format with sector specific information for decentralized authorization checks
  • Can be used for point-to-point and single-signon scenarios via SAML

As it stands today the standard, coined “Den Gode Webservice” (the good web service), is a super-set of which SOSI is a specific usage, a sub-set. The mission was two-fold: to define a Health Sector specific format for system-system integration, while at the same time allowing the single-signon usage scenario defined by the SOSI project.

Although the standard has yet to prove its worth, today I feel that mission was accomplished.