RE: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed - Best Practices

From
Len Maskey
Date
2006-01-24T21:20:16+00:00
ID
Thread
RE: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed - Best Practices
First tell me what the Generico or SOALogic blueprint provides as general
value to the community and how you intend "the rest of the
framework" to add to that value.  Does anyone care now and will
anyone care when you're done?

Ken

At 03:53 PM 1/24/2006, Beack, Theo wrote:

I wouldn't say that this will
be our first deliverable, but I certainly be would in favor of creating
more structure around the adoption blueprints. One option which I think
might work well is to use the Genrico or SOALogic blueprint and from that
start to create the rest of the framework, which we can use for
subsequent blueprints.

 

Theo

From: Reza Shafii
[
mailto:] 

Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 15:23

To: Beack, Theo; John Harby; ;
; ; ; Jones,
Steve G

Subject: RE: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed - Best Practices

Theo,

 

Should our first deliverable then be a “Blueprint Adoption Standard
Guideline”? Containing templates, notation, classification, etc…? I can
see a significant amount of effort required for this work alone.

 

Cheers,

 

Reza

 

 

 

From: Beack, Theo
[
mailto:] 

Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 3:03 PM

To: Reza Shafii; John Harby; ;
; ; ; Jones,
Steve G

Subject: RE: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed - Best Practices

 

Reza, 

 

I think during
yesterday's call and the resulting conversations on the list we are
exploring several different topics, which I think is related to your
comments below. I agree that we should have some standard guidelines (+
templates, classification system, etc.) which we use for the creation of
the adoption blueprints. 

 

However, I do not
think we need a repository of SOA best practices in order to create
blueprints. In fact I think that the reverse might be true. Best
practices might start to surface out of the details of the Adoption
blueprints (and resulting real-world implementations). 

 

It is my experience
that many best practices would be implementation specific, with resulting
code, models, technology related implementation information, etc. As an
example you could have a best practice of how to secure Web Services
within an app server such as WebLogic. Such a best practice would be very
specific to a certain vendor product and implementation, which wouldn't
fit into the charter of the TC. At the same time it might be difficult to
replicate or reuse the same best practice within another implementation
where a different app server is being used.

 

I can also describe
various other examples of quite generic best practices that are removed
from physical implementation, but before exploring these in more detail
we should consider the question; what is a best practice? Before we can
decide whether to include best practices into the TC's work we need to
define best practice, the role it will play, relationship with adoption
blueprints, how it will be used and of what value it is to the larger SOA
community.

 

Theo

 

From: Reza Shafii
[
mailto:] 

Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 13:47

To: John Harby; ; Beack, Theo;
; ; ; Jones,
Steve G

Subject: RE: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed - Best Practices

Shouldn’t a blueprint creation
guideline that gives us a common methodology/notation, classification,
and a repository of best practices (some of which could be just pointers
to existing best practices) precede the creation of individual
blueprints?

 

Reza

 

From: John Harby
[
mailto:] 

Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 1:06 PM

To: 

Subject: Re: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed - Best Practices

 

I would be in favor of a repository of best practices that are not
necessarily tied to a single blueprint but can certainly reference one or
more blueprints.

On 1/24/06, Beack, Theo
<
> wrote:

If we decide to
include best practices under the general Adoption Blueprint
"umbrella", it would be helpful to understand the relationship
between the blueprint and associated best practices. Immediate questions
I have is whether we will create "one off" best practices
related to a specific blueprint or whether we would try to make them
generic enough to be used within other blueprints. If that is the case,
do the best practices deserve to stand on their own and should we create
a classes of best practices that can be reused within Adoption Blueprints
(or even separately).

 

Theo

 

From: John Harby
[
mailto:] 

Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 12:38

To:



Subject: Re: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed - Best Practices

Possibly although I think
there are loopholes within the charter that would allow us to specify
best practices. Firstly, the Generico blueprint has some treatment of
best practices therefore inclusion and advancement of those is included
by this statement:

Circulate, improve, maintain and standardize the existing
"Generico" blueprint to be contributed, in the form of a basic
Adoption Blueprint. 
 

On 1/24/06, Beack, Theo
<
> wrote: 

Don,

I'm not convinced that we agreed on the role or place for best
practices

as part of the Blueprints TC. I reviewed the charter of this TC

(
 http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/soa-blueprints/charter.php)
and it

made no mention of best practices. Not that I think it is a bad
idea.

The notion of creating best practices could be of value.

However, we need to determine whether this TC will focus it's efforts on

only creating SOA blueprints (+ anti-patterns) or whether best
practices

will be included in these efforts.

I think one of the dangers of trying to focus our efforts on best

practices, is that we might enlarge the scope to the extent that it will

be difficult to focus and get some real blueprint work done. It is

definitely a topic worth discussing.

Regards

Theo

-----Original Message-----

From: Don Flinn
[mailto:
]

Sent: Monday, January 23, 2006 13:57

To:


Cc:

 

Subject: Re: [soa-blueprints] To Proceed

Agreed.

In addition, I believe that one of the goals that was agreed upon is

developing best practices, BP.  These could be partitioned into
the

following categories: 

- General BP, which would be applicable to all domains

- Domain Specific BP, where the domains might be:

   - Financial

   - Manufacturing

   - Retail

   - Professional services

   - Business services (not SOA services) 

   - Media & Marketing

   - Education

   - Government

Each of these could be further subdivided, but too fine a
subdivision,

IMHO, is not in the spirit of a specification.  If we could come up
with 

best practices at this level we would deliver information that would
be

useful to a broad category of people.  We could point out
significant

exceptions or additions for subcategories of the chosen domains.

Although the primary effort would be to generalize the BP as much as

feasible while still making them useful.

Don

On Mon, 2006-01-23 at 11:49 -0600,

wrote:

> To All,

>

> Here is what I gather from the group as a whole: 

>

> 1. Need a context on what we are doing.

>     - 2 cents:  A problem statement would
be a great start with

audience, etc...

>

> 2. Need to defining use cases to provide context on the blueprints

defined

>      - 2 cents: establish a use case
document that can be expand on

> this and may have domain related spin offs

>

> 3. Need to establish what a blueprint is.

>

> I think everyone should start adding to this list and adding
opinions, 

etc...

>

> This may help to create a bit of focus or strategy.

>

> Thanks,

>

> Dan

>

--

Don Flinn

President, Flint Security LLC

Tel: 781-856-7230

Fax: 781-631-7693 

e-mail: 

http://flintsecurity.com

 

 

--

    
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