Recently I was thinking and reading a lot about Work Flow Orchestration (BPEL), ESB, Jini, GigaSpaces, Messaging. And came to a conclusion that Work Flow Orchestration does not make sense because of very simple reason: not a single living thing in the nature is "orchestrated" - the incredible variety and incredible rich and complex behavior are all governed by sets of simple and local rules.
Therefore content based routing and messaging is the way to go!
1 comment:
There is certainly a degree of truth here.
In natural systems - externally visible behaviors are "emergent" properties of a collection or aggregation of individual components - cells, ants, molecules - whatever. Content based message routing is clearly inline with these sorts of decouple behaviors.
Yet, command and control hierarchies, can also be found in natural systems - including distributed "work flow". However, they are always emergent and based on stigmergy based behaviors; individuals responding to an emergent "group" metric.
The vast majority of software industry still fail to understand the potential power of dynamic/adaptive systems! Hence continue to build brittle / siloed monolithic middleware based solutions, upon which workflow is layered.
Of the technologies you mention - I wouldn't include Jini. Jini does not enforce any middleware choice - indeed - extremely dynamic systems can be built using Jini. Another real enabler is OSGi.
Some derivative of Jini / OSGi lay the platform for the sort of adaptive systems we'd all like to see.
Cheers
Richard
Post a Comment