Sunday, November 18, 2007

On CoDA - Context-Driven Architecture


Yefim Natis from Gartner, the same analyst who is bringing us the XTP vision
is also responsible for the brand new vision CoDA = Context-Driven Architecture; which is one or two steps further from the XTP era. In the previous posts about contexts: (1) ; (2)
I have argued about the use of context as a first-class-citizen in event processing; and indeed people act and think within contexts, and the use of explicit context can get the computing closer to the human thinking, and also has computational benefits (like indexed vs. sequential search in the early days of file systems). Both Yefim and myself did not provide formal definition of context when talking about it, and I still have a "to do" to think about it. One comment though about the "Architecture" - some people think that SOA and EDA are contradicting terms, since there can be only one "big A" - meaning architecture. As I have already mentioned - in the posting about EDA and SOA that they represent different aspects of computing, thus they are orthogonal (but can co-exist). The question is - whether context is yet another dimension that can co-exist with the other aspects ? again - still need to think about it. Thus, I'll return to the context concept soon.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Opher,

Context based routing, the basis for any new buzzconcept like "content driven architecture" is something that has been around for a long, long time. I have a number of briefings on my hard drive promoting context-based architectures, which in turn references others prior work in this area, that go back many many years. Some of my context-based routing powerpoints, for example, are almost 9 year old.

Yours faithfully, Tim

Opher Etzion said...

Hello Tim.

yes - the context idea, like most other ideas is not new, however, context as a major abstraction in an architecture is not a common idea. I'll explain it in more details in another posting

cheers.

Opher

Anonymous said...

Hi Opher!

Thanks. I look forward to reading "what is new" .... !

Cheers!

Yours faithfully, Tim

Unknown said...

Context-based routing usually refers to making decisions on routing based on looking at the payload of the message (additional "context"). I think Opher is talking about context outside of any particular payload, message or event.

Based on the diagram, I would say the context is based on the relationship of on payload, message, or event relative to other entities in it's "enterprise".