Belated Thanksgiving wishes – wondering a little why you’re reading a techblog on the holiday

Custom service invocation layer – I’m aware of a couple of examples some of which at least have properties of JERI but aren’t typically focused on Java. However this is just a distraction. The important point is that most of the invocation infrastructures one might choose are locked in some part to a particular architectural approach. Or at least they represent a particular set of compromises chosen by the vendor/developer that may not fit with all cases one finds in implementing these large systems. Ideally one would like a single invocation infrastructure that can cope with all eventualities which is leading some to build their own that take the best bits of a selection of infrastructures and combine them to get exactly what is required.

As to the rest of the posting, you’re pretty close to what I was trying to say which amounts to:

Systems of a certain scale and diversity do not easily fit within a particular style. When this happens, one must fall back on what I’m (perhaps wrongly) calling common sense – focusing on partitioning, various patterns that might pop up in one or more styles, past experience and so on.

Bruce Lee wrote something that I feel fits with what I’m getting at:

“Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms and since Jeet Kune Do has no style, it can fit in with all styles. As a result, Jeet Kune Do utilizes all way and is bound by none and, likewise, uses any techniques which serve it’s end.”

My (architectural) style is no (architectural) style, all I have are my wits and experience…..

I think the middle part of the post is the key message: for sufficiently large systems there may be more than one style of distributed architecture. And for some systems there may be a single style, say ROA, but although logically, or conceptually, it is a “single” system, the parts may conflict with each other if they were forced to co-exist to closely in a single implementation.

And so the lessons are, I think I am reading:

1) Don’t lock into a single style just to have a single style.
2) Don’t lock into a single implementation just to have a “single implementation”.

Or something?

I became lost in the last couple of paragraphs about “custom service invocation layer” — do you mean like Jini’s?

And finally with the CSA — “Common Sense Architecture” — what’s that architecture? What’s the common sense that does not exist in ROA or EDA (I’ll leave SOA out of it — that one leaves me feeling queasy in and of itself.)