SOA & Response Time: A Generational Issue?

by Don Fowler
March 1, 2008

Service consumers are not the only ones who should adopt pessimistic views of performance—service providers should be just as pessimistic when anticipating how their services are to be consumed. Service consumers should be expected to fail, sometimes without notifying the service itself. Service providers also cannot trust consumers to “do the right thing.” For example, consumers may attempt to communicate using malformed/malicious messages or attempt to violate other policies necessary for successful service interaction. Service internals must attempt to compensate for such inappropriate usage, regardless of user intent.” 

Both the requester/consumer and the service provider must agree to clear explanations of response time patterns. These patterns must incorporate the overhead to deal with the concepts of Web services and Microsoft’s stated pessimistic rationale. 

Users of existing green-screen 3270 legacy applications might scoff at the idea of adding 20 percent to the transactional response time, but can live with it if they: 

• Always get the same response characteristics

• Understand why these characteristics exist

• See the new corporate assets that SOA opens to them as a reasonable tradeoff for the 20 percent. 

The Generation Millennials will more than understand. They should embrace the SOA concept. But they, too, will have to be trained as to why some response times may vary when errors are introduced into the SOA solution. 

When developing a Web servicesbased SOA, remember your audience. What generation are they from? Structure your SOA approach to best fit the decision makers’ and influencers’ generations.