Aehso’s Output

Box, Vinoski and JBI.

An interesting conversion going on between Don Box and Steve Vinoski, started by Don’s comments/questions related to Steve’s recent IEEE Internet Computing article. They are definately ‘talking across’ one another (as Don puts it) and I think the reason is Don hasn’t really grasped the purpose of the JBI spec. Don states:

I do have a hard time seeing how the Java developer community is served by yet another programming/management/deployment model for writing hosted code.

JBI does not serve, and was never intended to serve, the general Java developer community, nor is it designed to provide a programming/management/deployment model for writing hosted code - it is for writing hosting code. I’m wondering if Don has read the specfication correctly? (Update: it would seem he hasn’t) The Target Audience section of the spec, in the Introduction section of the spec makes this abundantly clear:

The primary audience for this specification is system level software engineers who will develop the following:

• implementations of the JBI infrastructure itself
• the components that provide communications protocol support,business logic, transformation engines, intelligent message routing etc.

This specification is not appropriate for application developers or business analysts. It is hoped that this specification will facilitate the development of standard service composition tools and services targeted specifically at this group.

On an slightly unrelated note, Steve comments in one of his blog entries:

My take is that containers aren’t as special as we’d like to think they are. A container really just supports a particular programming model or style.

I’m a little surprised at this comment - surely anything that enforces a particular programming model or style is an important consideration?!?!

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