The blog

Thursday, June 02, 2011

gcc fails to install on Fedora 15

If your gcc fails to install on Fedora 15, it's probably because you started out with a pre-release version of F15.

The way to fix it is to run

yum distro-sync

that's it!

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

On the SOA failures, continued

So, why do most SOA initiatives fail? Or at least fail to reach their full potential?

I think it has to do with the fact that SOA is not a technology, it's a philosophy. It's a way of thinking about business automation. It's a way to let the computers do what they do best -- repetitive, boring tasks that humans don't like doing very much.

And like all philosophies, you will have your most ardent supporters and your most vehement opponents.

Add the fact that the word "SOA" has now become a cringe-worthy buzzword, pimped out by the vendors looking to score some quick consulting dollars and you'll start to see why a lot of people profess their support in public, while doing all they can to scuttle it in private.

I once met a guy whose sole job was to take an incoming currency rate text file and import it into an Access database. That's it! Is this the guy that would be the biggest champion of an "insertRateFileIntoAccess" service? Doubtful.

On the failures of the SOA initiatives

The promises of SOA are well known by now -- it allows for rapid development lifecycles, it permits easy changes to the business processes, it cooks everybody a nice breakfast in the morning, etc...

So, if this thing is so awesome, really, why do so many SOA undertakings either fail outright or fail to reach their potential? I'm one of the biggest proponents of the SOA methodology yet I'm often left scratching my head, surveying the wreckage that is an "SOA implementation."

The phenomenon is so startling that it is causing some analysts to proclaim that "SOA is dead!" What is going on here? I've never heard anybody say, "Nah, this thing is garbage" and yet it is very, very difficult to find a clean, elegant SOA implementation outside of whitepapers.

I'll talk more later about what I think are the possible causes of these failures but for now, I simply wanted to put this out there, see what people think.