What happened to SOA & Web 2.0?

In the hustle & bustle of the cloud & mobile computing these days, one gets to hear very little on the erstwhile “game changer” technologies such as SOA & Web 2.0. 

As far as Web2.0 is concerned it is living up to its promise and we are all witnessing the huge popularity of social networking sites. It is also interesting to note that these sites are contributing in their own way to technology evolution by fueling growth & debates on areas such as NoSQL. Also RIA products (Adobe Flex, MS  Silverlight) seem to be losing traction as HTML 5 is gaining everyone’s attention as the technology of the future Web based UI (Adobe is releasing FLASH-to-HTML5 translator). Web 2.0 even has a mobile angle to it as more people access their Facebook using their mobile devices than desktop these days.

On the SOA & web services side, technology evolution continues, although at a slower pace with more focus on governance these days than migration to SOA. Some new SOA aligned technologies that appear to be catching public interest these days are CEP and standard BPM (with BPMN2.0). People also seem to prefer REST for building their web services as compared to the spec heavy (WS*) SOAP based web services.

Complex Event Processing – A jargon criticized

The term used for this paradigm is totally inappropriate. If one thinks closely on this topic one would realize that all we are doing is “event correlation that is time sensitive”. Even, “Event Processing” would be a good although less relevant term but using the word “complex” is objectionable. The word suggests sort of an intellectual arrogance as if to say that this is something that ordinary people are not supposed to think about and only so called intellectuals should dare to think about it; as it is “complex”.

Yeah, yeah we all have heard Einstein’s quote on making things as simple as possible, but not any simpler. While that remains true; but what’s the subject expert who cannot express his/her subject without using any of the jargon associated with it. In my view, if a subject expert cannot express his/her subject in simple words so that a layman can follow, then the so called expert has not understood his / her subject well. The so called expert thinks about the subject in terms of the jargon and not the meaning behind that jargon. One who does will shun the jargon and express it in words that are meaningful to masses. Those using the jargon are making an attempt to distinguish themselves from the masses and gain importance and a sense of pride and security.

It seems that whoever coins the terms such as “C”EP have an underlying intention of coming up with tons of paperwork full of jargons and establish his/her selfish rights (read IP, Patents etc) over the subject rather than using the concepts to derive some value (i.e. apply) for the practical problems that we see around.