IT is in a worse place now than it was 5 years ago. The "thinkers" in IT are picking up the shiny new tools and shiny new things and yet again continuing to miss the point of what makes enterprise IT better. There are a few key points that need to be remembered.
- Art v Engineering is still the big problem - 90%+ of people in IT aren't brilliant, a large proportion aren't even good
- Contracts really matter - without them everything becomes tightly bound no matter what people claim about "dynamism"
- No technology has ever, or will ever, deliver a magnitude increase in performance
- The hardest part of IT is integrating systems and service not integrating people. People are good at context shifting and vagueness, good interfaces are fantastic optimisers but even average user interfaces can be worked around by users.
The likes of Clojure and REST haven't improved this situation in the enterprise in any marked way. Its been 5+ years since REST started being hyped and in comparison with the benefits that WS-* delivered to the enterprise in 5 years its been zip, zero, nada. The "dynamic" languages piece that kicked off about the same time has delivered similar benefits to large scale enterprise computing (you know the stuff that keeps most people in IT in a job) over the "old school" Java approach.
A few years ago I said that if you wanted a career then learn Web Services, if you want to be cool learn REST. Since then its become clear that some people have made careers in REST... but you know what?
- Its as hard to do a large scale programme with a large integration bent as it was 5 years ago.
- There are less really good enterprise qualified developers as they've got "dynamic" language experience and struggle, or worse bring the dynamic language in and everyone else struggles
- Vendors have been left to their own devices which has meant less innovation, less challenge and higher costs as the Open Source crowd waste time on pet projects that aren't going to dent enterprise budgets
In 5 years from 1998-2003 Java and Web Services went from near-zero to being everywhere, innovation was being done at the edges and then being applied to the enterprise. It was a melting pot and it improved enterprise IT, thanks in part to the smart people working at the edge and the way this pushed the vendors forwards...
Well now SAP, Oracle and IBM are still heavily backing Web Services but there is a big problem....
No one is holding them to account. With all of the cool, and smart, kids off playing with REST and Clojure and the like we've got an intellectual vacuum in enterprise IT that is being "filled" by the vendors in the only way that vendors know how. Namely by increasing the amount of proprietary extensions and software and pushing their own individual agendas.
So we get the bizarre world in which Siebel's Web Service stack has a pre-OASIS specification of WS-Security, last updated in 2006 by the looks of it. We get a world where IBM is still pushing the old MQSI cart horse as an "Advanced ESB" and generally the innovation in this space has just collapsed in the last few years. Working on a programme doing integration which uses Web Services in 2010 feels pretty much like 2005, sure some specifications have come out and there is some improvement but overall its pretty stagnant.
"Oh do REST then" I hear the snake-oil salesmen cry. Really? If you had to do an integration between 20 different programmes and over 300 systems in a heavily regulated area then you'd use REST? High value assured transactions between different vendors and providers over a "dynamic" interface?
Give me a break.
What works in these areas is what has always worked
- Define your interfaces, nail them down, get them right
- Test like a bastard to those interfaces
You can't do complex programmes without having those firm areas, this is why major engineering programmes don't have variable interfaces for screws. Now before someone pipes up with a nice edge case where 200 people did something complex then please do that 20 times in a single organisation and give me a call.
In 2006 I asked why there was no WS-Contract and the real reason was that it wasn't a good vendor specification (WS-TX is that) but its a brilliant enterprise specification. So WS just had Security and Reliability, important things for the enterprise, but didn't make then next step.
And what has REST given us in the last few years? Errr please, folks... Now in my current engagement there was a great area where REST would have been very useful (Reference Data) and some where it would have been quite useful (Federated Data Network Navigation). The problem is two fold
- Most people in IT appear to know bugger all about it. Now I continue to be surprised at how little people who work in IT read about what is going on, but I was really surprised at how little traction REST had.
- EVERYTHING is manual and there is still no standardised way to communicate on WTF you are doing between teams
Now if you had 2 then you can do 1. I did this with WS back in 2000-1 when most people thought I was just making up this WS stuff I could run between the data centres over port 443, I had interfaces, they had tools, we got it working.
Now before RESTafarians jump up and talk about all of the wonderful WEB things they've been doing. That is great and wonderful, but its not my world, my world is having 300 systems that vary from 20+ years old to just being built and I need to get them all working together. Even when REST was the right "architectural" solution it was the wrong "programme" solution as it would have driven us off a cliff. My world does have stratospherically large budgets however... you know what, if you want to make real cash wouldn't it be a good idea to address the richest part of the IT market?
But my real ire I reserve for a company I used to really respect but which, at the same time as REST began to get a load of buzz, drove a huge amount of enterprise IT off a cliff. When Java SE 6 was released I said it wasn't enterprise grade and indeed very rapidly the stupidity of the decision to push JAX-WS into JavaSE became apparent (yes please note I was massively against WS-* in JavaSE, partly because if someone wants to be a RESTafarian why the hell should they have to have WS-* cruft in their environment?). This was also the release that added in scripting to Java SE.
I'm now seeing 4 years later the impact of this stupidity on the enterprise. Java SE 6 is dribbling in under the application servers but the mentality that it represented, namely that Sun was more interested in "Joe Sixpack" and the cool crowd than the enterprise really helped to ensure that it was left to the vendors to undertake the enterprise side and Java began to stop being the innovative platform or language. The bits that the enterprise wanted, things like profiles and dynamic loading, were deferred into Java SE 7, which is now (by my reckoning) 2 years over due.
Sun championed the new "cool" languages and undermined the whole thing which made Java good for the enterprise, consistency. Having lots of different languages is rubbish in the enterprise, having the same basic platform from 4 different vendors is much much better on every level. So now we have people proposing doing programmes with 4 or 5 different languages and its being seen as "reasonable", we are also seeing some great developers doing some interesting things on platforms that will never bring benefits.... I can't help but wonder whether Spring or Hibernate would ever have delivered any benefit if it wasn't for the fact that they operated on the common platform... oh wait I don't have to wonder, they wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful.
So the last 5 years have been poor ones for enterprise IT. WS-* is the only viable system to system integration mechanism for large scale programmes, but its stagnating. REST has some cool stuff at the front end and for people who can invest in only the very highest calibre individuals but is delivering bugger all for the average enterprise environment.
Why is this a problem?
Well most of the modern world is driven by computers, computers are what makes economies tick and its integration that matters in a networked world. The immature and techno-centric way in which IT approaches enterprise solutions is ensuring that far from being an accelerator that works ahead of business demand it is IT that is all to often the dragging anchor to growth. This obsession with purist solutions that solve problems that don't exist are just exercises in intellectual masturbation which are actively harming developed economies.
Far too much shiny, shiny, far too little getting hands dirty with pragmatic realities.
So maybe I'll come out of this funk and people will point to the wonderful things that are massive improvements over the past 5 years and how some of the biggest enterprise IT challenges in the world are being solved by people in application support thanks to these new developments.....
But I won't hold my breath
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