HiveMind Presentation report

So, last night was the HiveMind presentation. It went rather well on the whole; people seemed interested and stayed for the whole (long) Q&A. I'd forgotten how exhausting doing a live talk can be ... plus it was hot in the room.

Major stumbling blocks:

• The benefits of a service-oriented architecture are intuitively obvious to me but I had trouble explaining them off the cuff. SOAs promote testability and reuse, by allowing easy decomposition of complex problems into simpler building blocks. SOAs make you think about state ... where you need it, where you don't.
• XML and XML rules. This prompted a distracting side track about the usefulness of XML and Dan Jacobs was really questioning the concept of having a stack-oriented scripting language (regardless of how focused it is) as part of HiveMind. People were also looking for alternates to XML.
• There were some concepts that needed to be fleshed out a bit more; especially the idea of using a factory to construct new services (which came up again in Q&A).
• A few key ideas that were out of scope for the presentation (such as the threaded service model) should have not been mentioned at all.
• Needed to set the expectations better ... people kept coming up with ideas (remote services!) that are, basically, just J2EE in disguise.

Still, the Q&A was lively and people seemed interested. It revved me up for my upcoming ApacheCon appearance (which I need to practice for!). Life is just too busy.