jbrunt's blog

While I've been at times a braying mule in my vocal support of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to design I have lately come to feel a burr under my saddle. This irritant manifests itself as what I perceive as a mismatch between large-scale enterprise-oriented SOA and our research-oriented cyberinfrastructure needs. SOA being a system-level architecture approach, it's easy to get bogged down in the complexity of design. Defining web services, with the complexities of WSDL, SOAP, security, and other WS standards quickly becomes the end and not the means to the end.

Over the last couple of months I've watched from the relative safety of academia as the hurricane of hype over “cloud computing“ has made landfall. As if perfectly choreographed and orchestrated by industry weather wizards, the pundit analyses have been spawned like so many tornadoes and it seems someone must have known Nicholas Carr was about to put out another book because that too fell into perfect synchrony like the quintessential windblown journalist on a seawall.

In my address to the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Information Managers in August of this year I included a number of quotes from current uber-thinkers about the future of IT. Among those were several folks including, Ian Foster, director of the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, that related the prophecy that Computer Science would become as important to science in general as the field of mathematics. In other words computer science would be part of the core curriculum.