Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

I am spending more and more time with my head wrapped around BizTalk in one way or another and very recently I am glad to say that I successfully navigated the MCTS exam and certified as a BizTalk specialist. Does this mean that I expect to do a lot of work in BizTalk from this point on? Good question. Well I do expect to do some yes and I am hoping that I will be able to offer the measured position of being from the camp that does not reach for BizTalk to solve every SOA problem looking for a solution.

There are alternatives

I do appreciate many of the features of BTS 2006 but I must confess that sometimes I do hear some absolutely mad assertions coming from those who would throw BizTalk at every problem where messaging was a clear choice. I have heard voices hold forth that ALL business rules should be managed in one central location (in BizTalk) and that all applications and line of business applications should make BizTalk their messaging target endpoint. I remember  objecting to this idea firstly on the grounds that it was out of alignment with the budget constraints of a given project and secondly that it was clearly propagating fallacy number eleven of the fallacies of distributed computing. Now in this particular case my argument was pretty solid but I should also point out that it’s not always that cut and dry. BizTalk may well be the right architectural and financial choice in many cases where we know that scaling out on mass wont be a future consideration coupled with a short delivery window imperative or perhaps a business lacking in the capability to maintain a considerable software team required to maintain a complex custom SOA application. This does not exhaust the list no doubt but gives an idea.

SOA without the bells and whistles

I may want to build my own very light weight SOA framework or use NServiceBus, either option affording me the option to deploy multiple versions of the same service at different geographical points across my LAN. In this scenario my rules should stay with my service, I don’t fancy the idea of wearing the expense of BTS for every long running (or otherwise) service I write and I have all those nicely designed domain entities that have come out of my having been Domain Driven all along the way! Heck I may even be using WCF and WF in the most out of the box fashion and even then it makes very little sense to put all my business rules in one place just because I can. Centralizing things in my architecture expose me to a single point of failure, which we know isn’t a great idea. Some will argue that it’s easier to maintain in one place and if our environment is lacking in complexity then there are times where that does hold true, but over time as developers and architects begin to pile things into one place things might start to unravel. Imagine a BizTalk environment that begins to exhibit as a massive repository for your organisations business rules! Hmm, if I change this one rule here what happens to all the logic that uses my other 1300 rules and which one of them have dependencies on the rule I just changed? I should clarify here: I am not ready to throw out the baby with the bath water just yet however, I wouldn’t even begin to consider for a moment the notion that I should build tools for mapping or adapters for some of the LOB applications out there, these very mature aspects of BizTalk can exist very nicely behind my services rather at the front of my design.

Figure 1.0

Oslo is certainly suggesting architectural decisions like that exemplified above, where the BizTalk hosting environment continue to be used for integration services and the ‘Dublin’ Server be used for application services. This distinction has me curious; will Oslo’s process server be similar to BizTalk with respect to being a Broker? In the meantime as I become more adept at using the product, I feel more at peace with making up my mind about why, when and where BizTalk makes sense.