"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Disappearing the Fabric

I guess BOA means "Business Oriented Architecture"? In any case the following from Juval Lowy makes sense...

The idea behind BOA is a technology that bridges the gap between the business analyst expert and the SOA developer. BOA will have to not only interoperate with a long tail of legacy technologies, it will also have to interoperate with BizTalk, and do so without constricting itself too much. Clearly BOA will use standard patterns like Indigo Marks. I don’t think that BML (pronounced bimmel, Business Markup Language. XML for MBAs) is something we should care about because I really hope for some visual tool to do that for me.
I think we as developers can build an infrastructure that can turn 50-80 percent of business automation development over to the MBA's that otherwise would be twiddling with Excel and Access. If you know an associate who's non-technical but has built a golf tournament application with some forms and reports, they should be able to define, test, and deploy a distributed, collaborative operational and analytical business process used concurrently by dozens of people inside and out of their legal corporation.

We just have to give them the fabric to stitch together. And like Juval says, we can't give them XML or SQL. We have to make collaborative system definition, test, and deployment even easier than building in Excel and Access for the single user.

If Microsoft has something in the works that will really reduce the number of technical developers necessary to deploy a collaborative enterprise system, great. Less C#, more BOA!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think that is what Charles Simonyi has been working on all these years. No wonder he's left MS. He is almost ready to release his Intentional Programming development environments: Unplugged: Charles SimonyiWord processing pioneer and Microsoft emeritus Charles Simonyi is building tools that enable programmers to create software that more closely reflects what designers intended....
Simonyi's notion of pushing programming upstream is a PowerPoint-like design tool that allows stakeholders to describe an application in their own terms and then hand it off to the programmers to write a "generator" to produce the machine-readable code. His company will develop tools, taking advantage of recent innovations in aspect-oriented development, design patterns, model-integrated computing and other programming methods. In our interview, Simonyi explains some of the concepts behind intentional software development and how it will pave the way for more adaptable, reliable programs.
...
Unplugged: Charles Simonyi

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.