SOA is re-emerging, says Gartner

As recently announced "SOA is emerging from the Trough of Disillusionment within Gartner's Hype Cycle, and it is climbing the Slope of Enlightenment". Which is obviously good news.

Factors contributing to this resurgence are:

• The evolution of SOA beyond its clasical RPC-style (SOAP), on to REST, Web-oriented architecture and EDA
• SOA's enabling role in SaaS, BPM and Cloud Computing, which are currenlty increasing in popularity and adoption
• Underway SOA initiatives being accelerated, because of users wanting the benefits of SOA sooner.
• Unplanned adoptions of SOA resulting from deploying and using new packaged applications built with SOA

It recognizes that "Good engineering principles such as those embodied in SOA are timeless," as Jeff Thompson said in the Gartner report.

Template for Evaluating Architecture Descriptions

Here is a template for evaluating the quality of an architecture documentation, recently published at the IASA's content repository.

The template is organized according the four main aspects, namely:

1. Stakeholder and purpose
2. Content quality
3. Presentation and visualisation
4. Management

Each aspect is analyzed in a separate section, containing evaluation questions and metrics organized in subsections (or criterias).

Feedback about this template can be e-mailed to the authors at: jouni.markkula@oulu.fi and niina.hamalainen@aditro.com.

Microsoft "Oslo" - May 2009 CTP

Here is the May 2009 CTP of "Oslo", Microsoft’s next generation modeling platform.

This drop adds:

• The "Quadrant" modeling tool, used to browse and edit models in the repository.
• Domain models for UML 2.1, including Use Case, Activity, Class, Sequence and Component diagrams. Profiles and templates are also supported.
• An XMI importer for the UML diagrams mentioned.
• A domain model and loader for System.Runtime.
  

VisualStudio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 is now available for download from this page.