Personal service-oriented architecture.
There’s an important lesson here I hope desktop applications will learn, courtesy of the emerging paradigm of SOA (service-oriented architecture). In the realm of SOA, events are represented in an open XML format and flow through a transparent pipeline that’s open to inspection and subject to intermediation…When I mentioned Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video in a blog posting recently, it attracted an unusual amount of attention. Clearly many people long for the kind of human/computer interaction so clearly imagined in that video. This week’s InfoWorld column asks the question: How can today’s technologies deliver some of the kinds of intelligent assistance that we crave? My conclusion was that the principles of service-oriented architecture can apply on the desktop as well as in the cloud. If local applications exchange XML messages with one another, as well as with the services cloud, then the same techniques of observation and intermediation can apply in both realms. … [Jon Udell: InfoWorld]
Ironically, the graphical desktop popularized the event-driven model that’s being writ large in the Web services network. Now we need to come full circle. Local event streams need to be open in the same ways as network event streams are and for the same reasons. [InfoWorld: Strategic Developer: October 31, 2003]