Cheese & Contracts
If you're interested in SOA (Service Orientated Architectures), SOD (Service Orientated Design), SO/A (Architectures based on Service Orientation) or whatever you want to call it, a very interesting set of articles is on the way. The first installment is already here and it's called Dealing with the Melted Cheese Effect.
Christian Weyer, Maarten Mullender and Beat Schwegler have joined together to create this serie of articles, about pasta and cheese and how sticky the cheese should be.
Architecture is design, and design is about making trade-offs. It's a trade-off between the cost of change, the ease of building, the ease of maintenance, the required performance, and probably many other important aspects. This is not about making one bowl of pasta, it's about providing a good recipe to make many bowls of pasta, a recipe with a sauce that tastes good, has just the right stickiness to it, and changes depending on who is coming to dinner.
In other words, it's about designing loosly coupled webservices with the help of contract first design. Of course with a reference to Christian's WSCF tool.
Hopefully the follow up articles will be posted soon, as I have a feeling some practical/hands-on experience will be in the articles, instead of some high-level bloating I am used to read.