Zurich

Well I’m still in Zurich today, which is great. Two nights – soon to be three – in the same hotel room is welcome change.
Today I went up to the top of Mt. Rigi and hiked around a bit before coming back down. The public transportation system in Switzerland makes this kind of thing easy. And Switzerland is really a beautiful country.

Beautiful Swiss Mountains, Water, and Sky
I came here for two meetings with Credit Suisse. It is always interesting to meet with them because they have probably more experience with SOA than anyone else. One thing I can say is that they agree with us that top-down design, or contract first development, is the best way to go.
We sometimes do not get a lot of support for our approach in the industry because it seems like the old Java vs. Visual Studio wars just will not cease. It is really not important whether you use Java or C# – it is important that your service design meets the needs of the business, and can be mapped to an implementation technology.
Furthermore the value of the service is a lot greater than the value of the code that implements it since that can and probably will change, while the business service needs to remain fairly constant.
Contract first design and development is an important part of the Eclipse SOA Tools Project, and one of the big reasons we wanted to take the lead.
Although the weather was partly cloudy all day, I lucked out overall since it didn’t start raining until I got back to the city around dinner time.

Zurich’s Hauptbahnhoffstrasse – the Main Shopping Street – in the Rain
(As you might have guessed by now, I am enjoying the heck out of the new Canon IXY I bought in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago. The U.S. name is SD30. It’s great!)