San Francisco Framework and Web Services

[HS Thomas]

Paul, did any of San Francisco Framework make it into Web Services ?
It would be nice to track that through if you could give us a perspective.
regards
[ December 03, 2003: Message edited by: HS Thomas ]

[Paul Monday]

Hi HS Thomas,
Unfortunately, while I was at IBM, the SanFrancisco project did not make any use of Web Services (as Web Services and XML were really not around until the latter days of the "staffing" curve for SF). In fact, some of my last projects on SanFrancisco before I left for a stint or two in the storage industry was with J2EE and a very young XML specification. We could always see the value in XML, but how it was destined to be used was still not a "closed" topic.
The last time I encountered SanFrancisco was as an incarnation of WebSphere Business Objects.
I think, looking back, you still see a lot of respect for the project itself and a lot of missed opportunities and, hopefully, MANY lessons learned...I know I learned a lot.
If you want to check out a few VERY interesting books about "lessons" learned from SanFrancisco, look at the books:
Carey, Carlson, "Framework Process Patterns: Lessons Learned Developing Application Frameworks", Addison-Wesley, 2002
Carey, Carlson, Graser, "SanFrancisco Design Patterns: Blueprints for Business Patterns", Addison-Wesley, 2000.
The first is a very "social" treatment of the experiences on the project from the architects at the time (Brent Carlson and Jim Carey), the latter are some of the experiences with the design patterns built into the system. Both books are EXCEPTIONAL when you look at what was attempted.
If you want to start a separate thread on SanFrancisco, I would love to chat about it for a while, so many of the experiences from that project fall into my very simplistic view of life today.

[HS Thomas]

Originally posted by Paul Monday:
Hi HS Thomas,
If you want to check out a few VERY interesting books about "lessons" learned from SanFrancisco, look at the books:
Carey, Carlson, "Framework Process Patterns: Lessons Learned Developing Application Frameworks", Addison-Wesley, 2002
Carey, Carlson, Graser, "SanFrancisco Design Patterns: Blueprints for Business Patterns", Addison-Wesley, 2000.
The first is a very "social" treatment of the experiences on the project from the architects at the time (Brent Carlson and Jim Carey), the latter are some of the experiences with the design patterns built into the system. Both books are EXCEPTIONAL when you look at what was attempted.

There are always important lessons to be learnt from past projects. Thanks for the recommendations. I always wonderd why SFCF died a rather sudden death. It looked so promising at the time.Actually, I have the second book - I bought it when San Francisco and EJBs looked like taking off in a big way and the project I was on were considering adopting it and EJBs..

If you want to start a separate thread on SanFrancisco, I would love to chat about it for a while, so many of the experiences from that project fall into my very simplistic view of life today.

I hope you continue to visit the forum beyond Friday.
regards
[ December 04, 2003: Message edited by: HS Thomas ]

[Paul Monday]

I will try to continue visiting the forum, I love the ranch as a concept and an implementation. Its a nice, relaxed atmosphere.
You can see a lot of the SanFrancisco concepts around persistence embodied in EJB CMP Entity Beans. I know some of the architects worked on the initial specifications. Of course, people have love/hate relationships with CMPs and often go straight to JDBC or other patterns (DAOs and such) to access their data. Nonetheless, I have enormous respect for the CMP model.
I also still occasionally chat with Jim Carey. The time I was on the project I went between being a lead and being a "worker" so I learned a lot from Jim, Brent and the other designers on the project. I can't really say enough for how well engineered and thought out the whole project was. The 'die a sudden death' is interesting, I assume you were on the outside when it happened. I decided to leave as SF was starting to hit the downslope, really, in my perspective, you will see SF tailing off as EJBs started to pick up steam. They are very different problem spaces but the perception that a "home grown" infrastructure had to deal with really put significant challenges in front of SanFrancisco. It really let to my mindset today which is that the infrastructures, no matter how many bones you may have with them, are somewhat commoditized so...take advantage of the tools that are available and try not to rebuild things. The new Apache project (building the app server) will be a fascinating evolution of J2EE into the commodity world.

[Flora filozima]

Interesting Discussion

Website Design San Francisco