Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Just a quick note to thank Brenda Michelson for coming to St. Louis last week, and for the good people at CAIT (Center for the Application of Information Technology from Washington University) for setting it up, including my good friend Fred Domke. It’s a shame that her luggage couldn’t make it, but she still made the best of it. As Brenda reflected in her blog, events like these (the CAIT event, not loosing your luggage) can only help all of our work get better. I look forward to CAIT’s continuing workshop on SOA and being a part of it. As if that wasn’t enough, Thomas Erl also paid us a visit courtesy of Microsoft, including copies of his latest book.

Both presentations were very good. I always enjoy these exchanges on best practices and approaches to SOA. Everyone comes at SOA in a slightly different manner, and it’s interesting to see what points others emphasize or include. Thomas clearly came from the technical side of things, which was appropriate for the audience. Brenda, as I had hoped, brought the user element back into the mix. I was glad to see this as well as recent articles that also touched on this from Ron Schmelzer of ZapThink and JP Morgenthal (blog) of Avorcor.

Anyway, it was a good week for SOA in St. Louis. Hopefully, it’s the beginning of a good trend, although I certainly don’t mind having to travel to Orlando, San Francisco, etc. to discuss SOA.