Doing the Tech-Ed preconference on Building Connected Systems
I have been to the preconference of Tech-Ed Europe in Amsterdam today. The four sessions I joined were all about Building Connected Systems with today's tools. The presentations by Beat Schwegler and Avindra Sehmi were great.
These sessions are part of the architecture track and talk about how you could design the Messaging pillar of Connected Systems (there are five in total). They proposed a couple of models and methodologies you can use to really build connected systems. In the center is of course the Service Oriented Architecture.
Beat and Avindra propose that you design your Connected Systems using three models.
- The business model -> This model tells you WHAT a company does in business terminology. This model goes from high-level services an company offer and can go in iterations down to the activities that make up this services. These activities are still business activities that would have exist when modelled 100 years ago (without IT-systems).
- The SOA model -> This model takes the activities from the business model and design the data and contracts that you need to deliver these services. At an abstract level the service delivers an interface that you can reach using messages ('operations') with data going in and out. These contracts talks about this information.
- The technology model -> At this level the service are actually integrate. This was by far the coolest part. Beat showed a self-build demo that uses the Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) that generated most of the code necessary to build a service that adheres to the 4 tenets and separates implementation, edges, data and messages. Cool stuff and I hope his work will soon be published.
Great stuff and a very good session.