Thursday, September 27, 2007

More on EDA is EDA and SOA is SOA

Hello from Haifa again. My good friend Tim Bass has written a blog entitle EDA is EDA and SOA is SOA. I totally agree that EDA and SOA are not the same, more than that, I don't even think that they are talking about the same thing. Many people equate SOA with the synchronous "request-reply" style of interaction, but this is only one way to implement SOA, since SOA is not about interaction style, but about modularization or componentization of the enterprise, and hence it IT systems, introducing them as "services", the interaction style is a secondary issue, services can interact both in synchronous and asynchronous ways, and there is nothing inherent in the concept of services that say anything about the interaction type. EDA is indeed about asynchronous push interaction style, and this can be interaction between services, where we get both SOA and EDA, or interaction between other software artifacts, in enterprises that don't implement SOA. Implementation of SOA and EDA both make sense for other reasons and to solve other problems, and they are completely orthogonal. In enterprises that implement SOA there is a sense to use a combination of both, thus, it is important to position them in a way that they are complementary and not contradictory, since there are some misconceptions about it (exactly since some people interpret SOA = request / response). I may dedicate another blog to in-depth discussion about this two concepts. A side point - since this blog deals with "event processing", event processing is not implemented on top of EDA -- there are some cases in which event processing has "request-response" functions such as: getting events in PULL from the producer, which may be done periodically or on-demand, or event processing network that is implemented as part of transaction, and thus does not fulfill the loosely coupled principle of SOA. Thus "event processing" is not a pure EDA.... confused ?
more - later.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

youre thinking too "apples and oranges" ("EDA and SOA"). blindly combining the two results in a bubble-gummed system.

think "ED-SOA" as an approach that combines features of both EDA and SOA, but is unique on its own.

Opher Etzion said...

ED-SOA is fine. The idea was to explain that EDA and SOA are terms in different levels - not really apples and oranges, since they have intersection unlike apples and oranges. I agree that if a combination is used, it should be used wisely, with selecting the right way to combine, and you may call it ED-SOA

Opher