Development as Configuration

re:

a little more SOA topic drift ... but one of the other SOA characteristics frequently is multi-tier architecture. Somewhat prior to starting ha-cmp

my wife had co-authored and presented the response to a gov. RFI for a large campus-like distributed environment. In the RFI response ... she had formulated the principles for multi-tier architecture. We then expanded on those principles and started presenting them in customer executive briefings as 3-tier architecture.

unfortunately this was in the SAA period ... which could be characterized as the company attempting to put the client-server (2-tier) genie back into the bottle ... which frequently put us at direct odds with SAA crowd. We were also heavily pushing enet as a connectivity. The SAA crowd were heavily in with the token-ring people who were advocating corporate environments with something like 300 stations on a single lan (which aided in pushing the idea of a PC as an extremely thin client to the corporate mainframe). Somebody in the T-R crowd turned out a comparison of enet & T-R, makings statements of enet typically degrading to 1mbit-sec. (or less) effective thruput. This was about the time of a acm sigcomm paper about typical enet degrading to 8.5mbit-sec effective thruput under worst case scenaro with all stations in low-level device driver loop constantly transmitting minimum size packets.

various past postings on 3-tier architecture, saa, t-r, etc

T-R disclaimer ... my wife is listed as co-inventor on one of the token pbutting patents from the 70s.

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