William Martinez Pomares

One of the main principles in Software architecture is the fact that there is always an architecture. That is, there is no system made without an architecture in place. Good or bad, the architecture is, conceptually, the system structure, the organization of components, their relations and the relations they have with the system’s outer world. So, you cannot have a system without it. The problem, discussions and disagreements come when we address the architecture actual handling. There we may find the position of letting the architecture “emerge” from the code written. Architect’s are sometimes decidedly marked for extinction, since they are not needed for development, simply because they do not “code“ but perform a Big Design Up Front that is useless at the end of the day (that is what that position holds as true, I disagree of course). Other positions often refer ... (more)

WADL, REST and WSDL

Paul kindly pointed to a blog entry about WADL use in REST, (WADL definition is found here). The Blog entry was interesting to read. I want to quickly explain that WADL is meant to describe the possible interactions with a Web Application. Thus, it has methods, but those are HTTP commads, and it also describes the query variables (like the fields in a form) that the method needs to send to the web application. Finally, it describes the expected response. Now, in the blog I see some misconceptions. First, it relates SOAP and WSDL to XML-RPC. That may seem true due to actual use of... (more)

WSDL 2.0 - a REST Friendly Language

Originally posted 07/20/07 @ 12:47:55 pm W3C has published the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Recommendation. That means we can talk about a new standard now. From history, you can recall SOAP was not a standard by committee but a de facto one, and WSDL 1.1 was a member submission done by Microsoft and IBM. Seven years later, WSDL 2.0 comes to see the light. I mentioned before in this blog that WSDL offered four types of messaging, a combination of style/encoding parameters. There was an RPC style, and a Document Style, and for a backward compatibility, RPC ... (more)

Longer Abstract for TSSJS presentations

DSL and Testing: using JSR in the Polyglot Architecture. Long ago, we started working with a Client, PushToTest, that has a tool for testing. The main idea of this tool was the ability to repurpose unit tests into functional, load and Monitor tests. It has also a proxy to record all transactions against a web page, so the transactions could be replayed later. At some stage, the intermediate language chosen to script tests and record the transactions was Jython. Over the years, it was learned that not all people knew Jython, nor Python nor Java. So, other scripts were added, adding ... (more)

Why Web Services Failed at SOA (and Why REST May Fail Too!)

First, let's review what is the concept behind services, with particular mention of the web services themselves. A service is a business functionality exposed by a simple interface. Note that it is not an object, nor a method, nor a module, not a procedure. It is pure business functionality. Services are consumed, not called, nor executed nor invoked. We define the service consumption as the interaction between agents, a client and a provider, which will communicate using a messaging system, where the data unit is a document. Consumption may be local or remote (meaning a service ma... (more)