Jorgen Thelin points to a John McDowall blog about Architecture by Intent in which John talks about how Linux kernel upgrades requiring hardware upgrades is a bug requiring more architectural emphasis to fix.

When I first read Jorgen’s blog, I assumed that John was talking about Web services; I have a one track mind, I know. But I’ve tried to ask Web services proponents what the architectural constraints of Web services are, and even made a good faith effort to write them down (as compared to REST), only to have the attempt called a blatant troll.

So somebody please tell me; what are the architectural constraints of Web services? If nobody knows, then aren’t Web services “Architecture by Accident”? But if they are known, let’s sit down and figure out what properties these constraints induce so that we can tell if they can do what people want them to do. Yes, that’s a challenge.