Scott Leberknight's Weblog

Have you ever wondered, what is the best way to implement SOA in your organization? How can it help you? What benefits await and what are the possible gotchas? Well, here's my take on it:

Used this way, the benefits include ensuring my monitor is at eye level for proper posture when writing code. In addition, any time I read in some article how SOA is going to solve the world's problems at some undetermined point in the future, I can always look down from the monitor and see the real role of SOA. Among the possible gotchas? For one, I have to actually look at the words "Service-Oriented Architecture" all day I suppose. Perhaps turning the book around might help on that issue. Another, possibly offending those who would prefer to use SOAP for all message passing (in lieu of methods which of course tightly couple the message sender and receiver, right?) in their application to ensure loose coupling between their components. Last, if and when the SOA hype cycle gives way to the next hype cycle, I'll need to actually spend more money to get another book to remind me to disregard the hype.

Quick rule of thumb: Don't show users cryptic error messages. This one was an error I recently received at a major airline's web site while checking in online for a flight:

Internal Session Id 1207429769869209087112251146956
User Session Id H3qJ4YGjTnTH1Sv0d4nVMBNhr2vdn77m4MKGQ3MT0SVVhQQvsQBk!1447771105!1207429769869
telprdB UserIntB12 java.lang.NullPointerException

That's a lot more information than should be given out to anyone, and is certainly not "user friendly." Do you think they are using Java? That NPE didn't give it away did it? Then again you can pretty much figure that out from the ".do" on the end of the URLs they use, which is one reason why web frameworks these days allow you to map things in a more REST-friendly and technology-agnostic manner using *.html or something like /my/site/person/1. Another rule of thumb: design URLs to be technology agnostic and generic, so that just from a URL it cannot be determined what technology you are using and in case you need or want to switch to a different technology you could theoretically use the same routing scheme in your URLs, which would allow bookmarks to keep working.

Last week I went to the Cocoa Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch. It was held outside Atlanta at the Historic Banning Mills country inn in Whitesburg, GA - pretty much in the woods in the middle of nowhere, which was nice because there were no distractions like when you go to training in a big city where you want to go out do things every night.

Aaron Hillegass taught the class and is the author of the excellent Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X which was actually what we used during the class all week. The bottom line for me was that this was the best training class I've ever attended. It was basically one week of intense learning and writing (lots and lots and lots of) code, as the class was way more hands-on than any other training I've attended. Aaron would show some slides on a topic, talk about the real-world implications, and then we were off working through the examples in the book with Aaron providing help and guidance along the way. Everyone in the class was extremely motivated to learn and Aaron (as well as Mark Fenoglio who was assisting Aaron and the students) was willing to stay late at night helping you out with the code labs and exercises.

At Big Nerd Ranch it goes like this: Wake up and go to a nice sit-down breakfast where you try not to eat too much of the good food they provide. Then you go downstairs to a nice classroom from 9am until 12:30pm and write lots of Cocoa code. After that you have more good food at lunch, have about an hour of training after lunch followed by an afternoon hike. Below is JavaScript (and Cocoa) Jedi Master Jason Harwig making his way on one of the hikes along with several other photos I took along the hikes.

Hiking along the river:

An old mill along the river:

The hike (and apparently swimming as well in the summer months) is a great way to break up the training day, refresh, and re-energize. Usually about that time in other training classes I would prefer to take a nap and require need a mass infusion of caffeine. But after the hikes I was ready for some more Cocoa! After the hike you go back and do some more learning/coding until about 6:30 when a nice country dinner is served. Good food and they provide free wine and beer, which is always a plus anywhere! After dinner many students actually go back to the training room and write code for several more hours and somehow you actually want to do it! In other training classes by about 5pm my brain is on the way out and I want to stop doing anything related to training. For some reason here, though, you seem to have more energy and drive to keep on coding.

I had a great time and am planning to go back and take more training there, probably the Python Bootcamp since I have been interested in Python for a few years now and have written some admin-type scripts for various projects I've been on as well as worked my way through a Python introductory book. Now that Google App Engine is available and that you currently must code in Python-only I am even more motivated to go and take this course. I'm hoping that as influential innovative companies like Google show that Java and .NET aren't the only game in town to "real" businesses, perhaps they'll be more willing to implement projects in more flexible and lightweight technologies.