Orchestration Patterns

Sitting through an interesting talk by Dragos Manolescu of Thoughtworks on Orchestration patterns. He nails it with his observation that this really is the heart of a proper SOA but the industry in general is still suffering from the "SOA in 21 days" delusion which sees the focus predominantly on web-servicisifying their systems as opposed to stepping back and trying to get the benefit of business process productivity that SOA done 'properly' promises at any rate.

It was a nice little overview of the landscape of Orchestration related patterns ( more material on orchestrationpatterns.com so I won't rehash it here).
One interesting point was the way he positioned Biztalk versus IBM Websphere Business Integration modeller and brought out microsoft's pretty amateurish entry in the BPM for BA tooling space aimed at the non technical analyst who can quickly model and run what if scenarios. Biztalk 2004 , for all the PR around ease of use, is really meant to be used by pretty low level techies ( who can look at a port binding in the face and not flinch) and whilst there are sops to BAs, they are pretty much limited to excel based macros that frankly I have yet to see anyone using ( not unlike that other chestnut - HWS) . We shall see what BTS 2006 brings !!

All in all a useful talk and I just wish the industry woke up and started focussing more on BPM and orchestration rather than empty platitudes about SOA which remarkably, still seem to have currency in the trenches.