I've praised Owen Taylor on my blog. If you want to see for yourself why Owen gets such rave reviews, you can check him out at the New Jersey Microsoft Developer's Group this week. If you're in the area, this is a worthwhile session.
The meeting is at:
194 Wood Avenue South (Prudential Building), Sixth Floor
Iselin, NJ 08830
Here's the abstract of his talk:
Space-Based Architecture and the End of Tier-Based Computing - Owen Taylor, GigaSpaces
Most business applications are
architected using a tier-based approach
(presentation, business logic, data tier). The
emergence of powerful and new commodity HW and
the introduction of SOA/Grid architectures touts
the promise of achieving true linearly-scalable
systems at a lower cost. However, as we shall see in
this presentation, these new platforms and
architectures are not aligned with the existing
tier-based approach, which is by definition
centralized and static. During the presentation,
a new approach will be introduced - Space Based
Architecture (SBA). It is basically a
combination of Distributed Caching, SOA and Grid
concepts combined into a single coherent
architecture optimized for high-performance
data-intensive applications, which transforms
existing tier-based applications into linearly
and dynamically scalable services. Towards the
end we will also discuss a real-life example of
a financial application that was built using the
SBA. We will explore the patterns used to
achieve this goal and explore how it can be
applied to other applications with similar
requirements.
