Sean McGrath posted earlier
today a reply to
a message in the Service-Orientated-Architecture group that I think grasped a pretty
significant idea: Purpose-agnostic data representations, and their value in SOAs and
EAI (or just interoperability in general).
The key sentence was: "The real trick with EAI I
think, is to get purpose-agnostic data representations of business level concepts
like person, invoice, bill of lading etc., flowing around processing nodes. The
purpose-agnostic bit is the most important bit. OO is predicated on a crystal ball
- developers will have sufficient perfect foresight to expose everything you might
need via an API. History has shown that non of us have such crystal balls."
I happen to agree partly with his
ideas on OO also presented in the message, but that's another story :)
