The South East Asia SOA Weblog

Just read an interesting blog, “Why do Java developers hate BPM?".

I wonder if it is true, since up to now, I don’t see any business people who is willing to even touch the BPM system.
Maybe in the future, when words can be translated directly to a business process, the business people will use it (you know what I mean? words like, after an order is received, assign the order to some of our guys then bring me some coffee … bla bla bla). What an excellent BPM that would be that masks all the tehnical details from the business people point of view.

I remembered a few years back, a friend said to me that in the future people don’t need to type in codes to make computer programs. All they need to do is “click and drag” and voila!, a computer program is born.

This has been a dream of IT, to have a way that really supports Business Agility, having the business people just ‘click here’ and ‘drag here’ in order to get their needs fulfilled.

The closest one to such solution today is a Business Process Management system. Although the concept has been around for a while, we are still far from the dream that business people can compose their own computer program using a very intuitive technology. A BPEL process needs to be instrumented by various connections to WSDLs and XSDs. The back-end systems still need to be developed by brainiacs who speaks Java or .NET. But then again, if there ever comes a day when business people can “compose” their own system (maybe using natural-language voice activated commands), we, the IT people, may be out of job, aren’t we?

You gotta love vendors and the fact they assume so much and generally know so little about the solutions they are pushing. What annoys me the most is when they try to push you into using proprietary technology by calling it open or something suggesting that it will not lock you in when all they are after is a lock-in strategy in the first place. I have previously been on porting projects with a certain vendors J2EE stack migrating vendor specific framework code to servlets. Kind of frustrating when they still pull stunts like that.

South East Asia is the most populous region in the world and also the most culturally diverse. There are many leading lights and unsung heroes amongst us. Let’s hear from the leading lights and share their thoughts in open forum.

This category is for tracking the antics of vendors and documenting your vendor experiences so that other users of this blog can benefit. After all, as a community of architects we need at least some way of keeping vendors honest and knowing where the best value can be found. This blog is not sponsored by any vendor or aligned to any vendor in any way at all.

Welcome to the South East Asian SOA Weblog. Be as expressive as you wish within the bounds of normality and whatever the moderator can tolerate. Obviously we would prefer you not to indulge in posting inappropriate language or content and reserve the right to ban any user that does not comply with our policies.

The idea of this web log is to journal the experiences and opinions of SOA pundits and in fact anyone that has an opinion about service oriented architecture as it relates to our industry in South East Asia.