Way back in 1989 when I was at university I had the good luck of doing a course on operating systems taught by John Lions where we got to read the source code to Unix. John was largely responsible for introducing UNIX to Australia. I remember to this day when he asked in a lecture on networking:

What does ISDN stand for?

To which he followed up with:

I Smell Dollars Now.

Showing my age here, but this was in reference to ISDN which was a comparatively new technology at the time. Telstra, then know as Telecom Australia, were over charging for the new technology.

So what? Well when ever I hear about research buzzwords and technologies, I always end up saying to myself "I Smell Dollars Now". Web Services and the follow up, Service Oriented Architectures are no different. I think the parallels between CORBA and Web Services are staggering.

Armed with this information about my background, you would understand why I resonated with Rockford Lhotka's posting about SOA, dollar signs and trust boundaries. I am going through the issues on a project at the moment about how to apply Service Oriented Architecture principles. Rockford's discussion on trust boundaries is excellent.