SOA workshop
I had a long chat with frank regarding where it is better to keep asynchrony in a service design. he had a slightly purist view in my opinion where he maintained that asynchrony should be inside service implementations and built in to the design. My view was that most SOA based projects have to deal with a large number of legacy systems which have inherently synchronous charcateristics ( especially in the way web services have been implemented in the last 3 years) and in these situations it is better to get asynchronous behaviour through middleware or an intermediate queueing system such that the consumer of a synchronous service can still behave asynchronously without the service implementation needing to change. He thinksthis is not ideal - but the real world isn't :)