Commonality and Variation

I comment on Ted Neward's observations...

SOA as just another paradigm for commonality and variation... just so, even more generally. SOA is a new term, but people were arguing RPC vs. asynchronous message passing 20 years ago, not just in the labs but in production.

I used Apollo Domain workstations and their Aegis OS at Boeing and Mentor Graphics. In the late 1980's I was in discussions about their built-in distributed OS and mailbox channels vs. the emerging broader standards for RPC. People were arguing about RPC parameters vs. sending ASN.1 data structures (i.e. flexible trees of property/value pairs). Not much new in this SOA world but the terms and new standards which look a good bit like some of the older ones!