http://www.soamag.com The SOA Magazine is a monthly online publication provided by SOA Systems Inc. and Prentice Hall/PearsonPTR and is officially associated with the "Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl." SOA en-us Copyright 2006-2010, SOA Systems Inc. http://www.soamag.com/I45/1207-1.php Among the most perplexing issues facing the design of a SOA is that of security. In this paper, we reach back four centuries for guidance on how to build SOA security... SOA http://www.soamag.com/contributors/bio-pwik.php#When:08.12.10 http://www.soamag.com/I38/0410-1.php As with politics and religion, information technology has its armies that fight for great truths in the name of half-truths. And one great half truth is that Agile and SOA are incompatible. On the face of it, that seems true. Service-oriented architecture must be top-down in conception and execution for it to be effective. Agile is a bottom-up systems development methodology that emerges from self-organizing collectives. SOA and Agile have both demonstrated their value and have firmly established themselves in the marketplace. And yet the experience of more than a decade at many hundreds of firms has exposed flaws in how SOA and Agile are practiced in the real world where vast resources are at stake. The purpose of this article is to reconcile these two paradigms into a complementary partnership... SOA http://www.soamag.com/contributors/bio-pwik.php#When:04.01.09 http://www.soamag.com/I39/0510-3.php System building is a search for truth, and SOAG is no exception. We must establish SOAG on a foundation of sound epistemology. SOAG must be above all a rational process, a process that binds us to principles of empirical adequacy and rational coherency without respect to what I believe or to what the team believes. Empirical adequacy requires that the concept under question be amendable to empirical verification and asks the question: does it meet the evidence? Rational coherency requires that the concept should be consistent with other concepts that were arrived at rationally. It asks the question: is it consistent within itself? SOAG asks us to think for ourselves. But, in contrast to Agile, SOAG makes the radical claim that we should not think for ourselves. "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing," writes Alfred North Whitehead. "The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations that we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle-they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses and must only be made at decisive moments."... SOA http://www.soamag.com/contributors/bio-pwik.php#When:04.01.