Interesting week at Impact 2009 Conference with the WebSphere Cloudburst appliance and BPM Blueworks BPM in the cloud announcements showing the growing importance of the "cloud".
On the SOA front I had a very constructive discussion with Jérome Hannebelle from France Telecom/Orange (he wishes to be quoted) on a variability approach that differentiates the provider WSDLs from the consumer WSDLs. His interesting position is that to avoid the impact of version change the providers should expose more generic WSDLs with xsd:any for all the service message parameters branches that are subject ot release variations, however consumers should for the same service be provided with validation WSDLs that have explicit definition of the parameters for a given release. The provider then need at run time to identify the service request version an apply the appropriate routing and handling behind the service facade. This approach is a variation of the patterns I describe in my book where I already state that the umtimate provider's granularity and interfaces may be different from the consumer view. The implication is the dependency tree management in the registry that it implies to that there is explicit correlation between the various consumer validation WSDLs and the provider WSDL.
On the fun side Las Vegas is an interesting location, I flew a total of 15 minutes at the indoor skydiving tunnel. A safe way of experimenting skydiving feelings.
