Nick Gall

As a few of my friends know, I live for epiphanies. I love to connect concepts. So I’m really happy to be having one now (it’s been a while as regular readers of my blog — if any remain — can tell).
For a LONG time, I’ve been talking about how all interfaces can be defined [...]

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Recommended: http://blog.maxindelicato.com/2009/01/17-distributed-systems-and-web-scalability-resources.html

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Anne Thomas Manes has started the new year of with a bang by declaring: SOA is Dead; Long Live Services.
While I agree with many of the sentiments behind Anne’s declarations that “SOA is dead”, I disagree with her way forward: “long live services”.
It is services thinking, as conventionally understood, that led to the mess in [...]

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The most important aspect of WOA is application neutral interfaces (or as some prefer application generic interfaces). Since interfaces are constituted by their IFaPs (Identifiers, Formats, and Protocols), this means that all three aspects must be made "as generic as possible, but not too generic" (playing off Einstein’s quote regarding simplicity).
We all know about generic [...]

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As my friend and colleague Anthony Bradley just pointed out in his blog, our WOA note has finally been published (subscription required) and it’s something that I am very proud of. Not just because my co-authors Anthony, Dan Sholler and I produced a well-crafted piece of research (if I do say so myself), but more [...]

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Judith Hurwitz apparently doesn’t like WOA. That’s OK. To each their own. [BTW, I choose to use the ungrammatical their/they/them as a universal 3rd party pronoun to avoid having to use gender specific his/he/him or her/she/her.] I can’t be too upset because her blog post turned me on to PollDaddy.com. Here is my first poll:
Do [...]

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How to GET a Cup of Coffee is a very detailed discussion of a RESTful application of ordering and paying for coffee at a hypothetical Starbucks. It shows a lot of the details needed to understand the power and flexibility of the approach. It even manages to explain HATEOAS (Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application [...]

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Eric Roch recently blogged (Gartner on SOA vs. WOA) about my REST interview and he asked an excellent question: “So let’s look at the [REST] constraints, can someone please tell me which of these constraints solves data semantics problems?”
The answer is the uniform interface constraint (UIC), which you can also think of as the “generality constraint”. [...]

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In talking with clients about SOA, WOA, and application integration generally, the conversation often turns to best practices for their IFaPs (Identifiers, Formats, and Protocols). First I always stress, as Tim Berners-Lee does, that of the three (I,F, and P) — Identifiers are by far the most important to information sharing. After all, the Web [...]

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