Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff

Interviewing Jim Webber

In this interview Jim Webber, Service-oriented Systems Practice Lead at ThoughtWorks, explains his ideas behind “Guerilla SOA” – a somewhat agile approach to SOA that relies on small steps instead of a large-middleware-centric route towards service-enabling an enterprise. Jim also advocates MEST (MESsage Transfer), an architectural style that focuses on messages the same way REST focuses on resources. In Jim’s opinion, the problem with most current Web services stacks are rooted in WSDL’s notion of operations, which he deems to be the wrong abstraction for SOA.

I had a chance to interview Jim at QCon London, and it was definitely a lot of fun — I can agree with most, if not all, of Jim’s views (except some of his REST misconceptions, of course :-) … more on InfoQ.