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by S-Cube Web Portal Administrator last modified Mar 22, 2012 14:01

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Would you like to fly with a spaceship that was assembled by service people?

This might never happen, but if we ever build a spaceship based in SOA, I'm not sure if I would like to go on bord. It would probably look very good on paper, but it would definitively not work without some minor or major "hiccups". Once in the deep space, one might run into a SLA violation and you probably would experience some disintegration of your spaceship.

This is, admittedly, a bit of a polemic description, but you can find some grain of truth in this statement. However, why should we build systems that are based on a fuzzy notion like services (see last post) and with heavy weight xml artifacts which difficult to understand (for humans) and even more difficult to use? So far, the tooling is not exactly what one wishes for and the creation of workflows appears to be a tedious and thus error prone task.

A way to look at things is to reason what one wants to do in the first place with services. Well, it's simple: we all wish to invoke a service with some input and expect some output. We want to make decisions, based on some expressions, either to invoke a service or not. The data that we base our decisions on can be the result that we get from other services (output) or user input. We also need some kind of support for the creation of loops and a place to store the result of service invocations (variables).

That's basically it. I'm aware of all those fancy concepts like compensation handling and so on. However, in my opinion this makes things unnecessary complicated and I dare say that some of this appears "academic" and not exactly useable in practice. Yes, there is always space for some PhD thesis that discusses a very specific detail of workflows :-).

What I question is the approach of creating workflows like full fledged languages with heavy semantics and lots of features. In my opinion, we can build workflows with simpler mechanisms and exploit existing script based approaches. The use of Groovy scripts is an example for this (see links)

I'm aware that this might appear to be yet another way of simply embedding service invocations in java (groovy being a super set of java), but it has some advantages over existing workflow approaches. Groovy is a dynamic scripting language which allows run time modifications and don't we all crave for runtime changes based on contextual information :-)? Of course there is much to do, but I think this could be a interesting direction which needs more and deeper investigations.

So would I fly with a spaceship that is programmed in Groovy? Probably not, but one can never know for sure :-).

- Martin Treiber

References/Links

Why BPEL is not the holy grail for BPM

Flow diagrams, turing machines and languages with only two formation rules

Structured Program Theorem

 

 

 

S-Cube KM iPhone App Update

The S-Cube KM iPhone App was updated.

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What is a Service?

What is a Service - it seems that we as Service community still have no clear understanding about this.

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S-Cube KM iPhone App is available in the iTunes Store

Download the S-Cube KM iPhone app: http://www.itunes.com/apps/sCUBEkm

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S-Cube KM iPhone App - Waiting for Review

The S-Cube Knowledge Model Application is currently somewhere (lost?) in the Apple Review pipeline.

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S-Cube KM iPhone App - Youtube Videos

New S-Cube KM teaser video is online.

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S-Cube KM iPhone App

Learn about the development of the iPhone KM App.

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S-Cube KM iPhone App

The S-Cube KM iPhone application is slowly taking shape.

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Eating the own soup - No matter how it tastes

More cooking experience from the eSOA front.

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Eating the own soup

The service community seems to suffer from what can be called a "lacking implementation attitude". There are nice concepts, but often no implementations that verify the concepts. Only one step away from this lack of implementation attitude is something that I would call Evidence-based Service-oriented Architectures, or eSOA, where each concept is supported by experiments.

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Lessons learned from the Wikipedia Community

Trying to add a S-Cube Knowledge Model Link in the Wiki Page of S-Cube.

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Joined Paper with Austrian SMEs

The Collaboration between industry and academia is not always easy to accomplish. The respective incentives differ considerably and sometimes, even if there is mutual interest in doing something together, it is not possible to do anything together, like writing a joined paper and submit it to a conference.

While paper writing is important in academia, industry - especially SMEs - are not really interested in writing papers with academia. One of the first questions that is asked is: Ok, this sounds interesting. We like this idea. But, how can we use this idea for our customers? What is the product? Sometimes, it is difficult to explain that there is no immediate benefit for customers by writing a paper with academia, but opens possibilities for future developments. Euphemistically speaking, a joined paper can be a spark which paves the way for future inventions.

We, at the DSG - http://www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/ - were lucky and we had the opportunity to collaborate with TISCO - http://tisco.at/ - to write a joined paper which we submitted to the ICIW - http://www.iaria.org/conferences2010/ICIW10.html - and that was accepted (of course, I might add :-))

For the future, we plan an additional joined paper with another austrian SME called iKANGAi http://www.ikangai.com/  They work in a different field, and it's certainly challenging to find mutual interesting topics. But this is an exiting challenge and we are more than willing to take it.

 

- Martin Treiber

What is a Service?

Defining Services is difficult.

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ICSOC/ServiceWave

Posted by Andreas Metzger at Nov 26, 2009 12:59 |

Hi S-Cubers and all,

I am here in Stockholm and enjoying the ICSOC/ServiceWave conference. Very interesting to see the diverse range of topics addressed by the SOC community.

 

Cheers,

Andreas (M :-)

 

S-Cube

Posted by Martin Treiber at Nov 23, 2009 16:05 |
Filed under: Conference

Welcome to the S-Cube Blog!

 

The S-Cube Blog is intended as informal way to disseminate research results of S-Cube. Well, maybe this was too formal ;-). So what can you really expect here? More or less a bit of everything, that is related to S-Cube (which is a lot). Expect conference reports (the ICSOC is currently ongoing at Stockholm and there is the MONA+ workshop today and tomorrow morning) or ideas about future developments in the Service field. Anyone is invited to participate and to write what she or he finds interesting. Of course, the latest recipie of your great grand mother may not be of interest for a broader audience... so take this into consideration and for now: happy blogging!

 

- Martin Treiber

 

 

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