CAB and Acropolis of little help for SOA interactions

After reading Nick Malik's post describing what he likes about Acropolis I was reminded of a conversation I had with the guys behind the CAB. Nick writes:

What I find promising: an Acropolis part can essentially consume a SOA service, allowing the composition of process and activity services to be as simple as snapping parts onto a surface.

Since services which conform to SOA principles will expose duplex/asynchronous APIs, this will almost necessarily make the client-side interaction multi-threaded. I do, and have done quite a lot of work on multi-threaded, thread-safe, smart clients. They're hard. Here's a post describing how hard. There are other solutions as well, but very little of it has to do with technology.

Since both the CAB and Acropolis do very little in handling, or even describing in their docs these multi-threading issues, I don't think that they're going to make it simple or easy to work with SOA-style services. This is not to say they don't provide any value. On the contrary, I think that they bring the mainstream many steps forward. However, there is still a long way to go.

Posted by Udi Dahan at 05:01 AM  Permalink