SOA workshop

Interesting workshop by Frank Schussman of Siemens on SOA and the design process in creating these architectures. He discussed an actual case study where they built a high performance SOA architecture to support very high throughput characteristics. This was a great all day session though some of the exposition of SOA concepts was a bit RPC like and not document centric enough ( phrases like remote APIs of services had crept into the presentation on services). it was interesting to see some of the technology decisions they ended up making - like rejection of EJBs and rolling their own container technology based on OSI's lightweight system used in embedded systems. Interestingly they also had a completely decentralised design with no central point for co-ordination of processes etc which resulted in them not stressing out their database too much.
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 :)