Do We Live in a Donut World?

Just read Peter Yared's blog on "A Big Muffin in a Donut World". He argues that because most software platforms today can speak http and xml (he calls it SOAP/HTTP) then it becomes increasingly unnecessary to support J2EE in the middle tier. His argument of why Java exists in the middle tier was because it supported a wide spanse of hetergenous systems. That reality is changing and he claims that J2EE in the middle-tier is bound for extinction.

Compare the new strategy of providing exclusively web accesible servers to the latest development lightweight development trend in Java. That is, the trend to ditch the J2EE server and work exclusively with a webcontainer. Architecturally similar don't you think?

The new trend that is emmerging is that of a multi-tude of web accessible services (not necessarily SOAP based) that are integrated into portal like rendering devices (i.e. a rich client or a portal).

See there are many ways to integrate systems. The industry has gone from several evolutions at to the best strategy of doing this. Beginning from the idea of a shared datamodel and database, evolving to a CORBA like model of application to application communication, to a universal message bus architecture and then now to a model of integration at the glass.

The inherent problem with this integration at the glass approach is that business logic is spread out all over the place. Well that's not exactly accurate, it's only spread out all over the place is you have a one to one mapping of your logical model with your physical model. However, if you got some aspect like technology that knows how to consolidate everything in one place logically and deploy it all over the place physically then you could possibly have a sane way to manage this new Donut architecture.

Now where would one place this aspect like technology such that it can be dynamically weaved into the fabric of the architecture. Recall that the nodes of this Donut architecture are heteregenous systems. The answer may actually be simple, allow all communuication through proxies.

Now I'm not sure if both forward and reverse proxies are necessary. There's a lot of ideas you can play around with here. Ideas for proxies on the server side can be found in this list of JDBC Proxy Drivers. On the client side, this list of "Personal Proxy servers" may be a good place to start.

It isn't much of a surprise the aspect-like behavior and proxies have much in common. Afterall, many people continue to confuse interception and aspect oriented programming as one in the same.