Dave Edstrom's Catalyst Edstrom Photons-Electrons

One of my pet peeves is going to a Conference, watching someone ask a very basic question, and then listening to the speaker or panelist go on and on using every buzzword every invented and not saying a damn thing.   This is especially true when topic is Service Oriented Architecture.   I brought this up at the last conference that I attended.  When someone asks what is SOA and the answer provides zero real life examples, then chances are you are hearing a description of what I like to call SnOA  - Snake Oil Architecture.   I have a very simple framework for judging answers that I call my THREE "C's"

1. Is it CLEAR?
2. Is it CONCISE?
3. Is it COMPELLING?
   

 

 The above photo is a snapshot of a small percent of the back of my cabinets that hold the AV equipment on the main floor in my house.  Yes, it is a damn mess.  This was created back in the 1980's and I just kept adding to it over time.  There are countless 75 ohm splitters and god knows what color coding that I was using.  It is too much of a mess today to break because it just works.  Integrating any new piece of AV equipment in turns into a nightmare, so I have not updated this setup in years.

Above is my Home Theater SOA for where I created a AV closet and tied into both existing as well as new devices.  Notice that I wired in for future use.  Future use means I pulled 100 pound test fishing line so that as new cable technologies come out it will be easy to pull this.  This is a good example of AV eEways or BCs (Binding Components) to speak to various input/output stereo/AV equipment.

 



Above is a picture of my Stereo/AV (NMR) Normalized Message Router in SOA OpenESB speak.  Just like a real SOA, as npg would say, "you want lots of goes_intas and goes_outas" with as many logical tees and filters as you can afford.