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"SOA Governance" Revitalized
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Reviving an often-discussed but poorly understood topic
The term "SOA Governance" has been used in the industry for years already, but it is still considered an arcane topic. Anyone who reads this article should be able to understand the following things:
- Why are people pursuing SOA, isn't it dead?
- What is the relationship of SOA Governance to SOA itself?
- What is SOA Governance?
- How does it differ from Management?
- How does SOA differ from Integration?
While being able to think and speak clearly about these topics may not win you as many brownie points as it would during the time when this was a "hot topic" for Enterprise IT, it will help you understand why SOA and SOA Governance continue to be significant issues for the Enterprise despite the ups and downs of market hype cycles.
Why are we still talking about SOA?
Anne Thomas Manes posted her famous "SOA is Dead" post at the beginning of 2009. Since then, some of the "fizz" has gone out of SOA. But by making two irrefutable statements, we can clarify why, in the words of Gartner Analyst Paolo Malinverno "SOA is Inevitable".
- Enterprise IT continues to suffer from bad architecture
- Since SOA was "declared dead", no viable alternative solution for this problem has been proposed.
In the spirit of InfoQ, I challenge anyone to either
- Propose a viable alternative that addresses the problem of "Enterprise Architecture Syndrome" as defined below. Or
- Show that a viable alternative has already been proposed
- Make a case that "Enterprise Architecture Syndrome" is not a significant problem.
Feel free to attack the premise that Enterprise Architecture is in bad shape as well. Please keep in mind that:
- This is an Architectural problem and requires an architecture solution (so programming styles like Events and Objects solve problems at a different level)
- Cloud Computing is not an Architecture, it is a delivery mechanism
- Business Process Management without SOA does not reverse "Enterprise Architecture Syndrome"
One of the challenges in maintaining a paradigm such as "Service Oriented Architecture" is that during the "peak of inflated expectations" in its hype cycle it became a "big tent" under which many many software companies huddled. Everything was marketed as "SOA" in the hopes that it would sell better. Of course the billions of dollars spent helped to blow up the hype around SOA to epic proportions.
Throw out the SOA Baby with the SOA Bathwater
One of the difficulties associated with SOA is the length of time it has taken for the industry, products and implementation methodologies to mature. Because of this achingly long time span, contemporary SOA bears little resemblance to the fanciful ideas of a few years ago.
So the question naturally arises—has the term outlived its usefulness? Wouldn't the community be better off throwing out both the baby and the bathwater and just moving on to the next concept? This seems a very legitimate approach, but since renaming my blog http://soacenter.com to http://whatevercenter.com in response to Anne's "SOA is Dead" post, there has not been a viable alternative to solving the disease that I call "Enterprise Architecture Syndrome."
The Disease: Enterprise Architecture Syndrome
Most large organizations suffer from a degraded architecture that I refer to as "Architecture Syndrome". Much like the human disease called "Metabolic Syndrome"; this disease has many risk factors including a heterogeneous and aging technology infrastructure, a company that has grown through acquisitions or geographic expansion, an industry undergoing consolidation, a stiff regulatory environment as well as the commoditization of platform software such as ERP systems.
Symptoms include an inflexible IT System (including hardware, software, integration and IT processes) that makes any changes into a nightmare of schedule slips and weeks becoming months. Diagnosis can include the creation of insane-looking architecture diagrams with hundreds of different product names and thousands of object models, data tables, events, processes, organizational charts, components, lines, integrations, connections, network topologies, standards, applications, schemas, documents and other abstractions.
Condition: Entropy
We best capture the degraded state of Enterprise IT Architecture by using the word "Entropy" from the physics of thermodynamics… defined as the amount of energy in a system that is unavailable for work.
There are many ways to measure the energy in Enterprise IT that is "unavailable for work", but you can really look at it as time and budget wasted. Wasted on throwaway systems, redundant systems, wasted on useless meetings (productive meetings are ok), maintenance and other abuses. Looking at the percentage of the IT budget that goes to move the organization forward, it's clear that for most large organizations the majority of the IT budget goes towards "keeping the lights on" and leaving not much room for anything else.
So this is a pretty dismal state of IT Architecture. One of the first things people notice when they decide to fix their architecture when they look at it from a global perspective is the number of redundant systems. This is typically looked at as a bunch of "Silos" and the Enterprise wide goal of reducing costs aligns with the idea that these redundancies can be "rationalized". This cost-cutting alliance between Corporate Finance and Information Technology spawned a field called "IT Governance" and SOA Governance is their red-headed stepchild.
How did Enterprise Architecture get so degraded? People with "Metabolic Syndrome" could ask themselves the same question. Typically the answer is decades of neglect.
Perhaps a deeper question is: what caused Enterprise IT architecture to be abused and neglected?
IT Project Management
The IT organizational competencies and processes that evolved during that era involve a mentality around disposable "projects" and a short term framework around "ROI". As long as a project could return its initial investment it was a justified expense.
There's nothing inherently wrong with ROI. However, the way ROI is typically measured in large organizations is typically as a forecast used to justify a project. Even organizations with the discipline to measure ROI after the project gets started rarely measure it over the lifetime of the project.
Let's face it, a "successful" IT project creates a "legacy". Very few ROI models measure the value of something over the time span of "until the organization disappears". These stable long-running "reusable" assets form the platform atop which the business functions.
IT goes through a Volcanic Hot Age
During the mid 1990's the volatile fuel of Venture Capital and IPO ignited into a "Hot IT Revolution" culminating in the Y2K spending cycle.
Carrying the thermodynamic perspective further, What do we mean by "hot"?
- Larger overall IT spend
- Faster change in the technology landscape
- Less mature technologies
- Expansionistic—building out rather than cutting back
IT funding and project management disciplines were evolved for this type of environment, one in which time to market was more important than cost.
During an expansionistic phase, the ROI calclulation of "pays itself back" translates easily to "let's do it!" But like the hangover after partying every night for a week, the longer term consequences of "let's do it!" need to be considered. Consequences that affect not only the project but the prospects of the whole Enterprise.
IT Goes into an Ice Age
After Y2K, the IT environment began to cool off. The industry, products and marketplace began to mature. Enterprise IT began to enter a contractile period.
If you have fewer pennies to spend, what types of considerations come to mind?
A few of the trends in recessionary IT seem to make Enterprise Architecture Syndrome worse!
- IT headcount is drastically reduced: Lots of people are laid off, significant expertise about legacy systems is lost.
- Short Term Thinking prevails: new CIOs are hired who have substantial cost-cutting agendas for their "first 100 days". Long term planning goes out the window.
- Draconian measurement systems are put in place: programmers are measured by lines of code produced, QA testers are measured by bugs fixed and everyone starts to focus more narrowly on their jobs.
- What's best for the Enterprise is thrown under a bus: the dominant pattern becomes "whatever saves my job/group headcount".
All of these trends cause even more friction between organizations—people feel more tightly squeezed, and when people feel pressured, their tendency to care about people outside of their group (or in worst cases, outside of themselves) decreases.
SOA is Dead, Cloud is Water Vapor and Enterprise 2.0 is a Crock.
In a period where the industry "cools down", large trends in IT tend to be based on "coalitions" of vendors associated with themes like SOA, BPM, EDA, Enterprise 2.0, etc. Of course alongside these "cooler" times, the amount of time for technology to be adopted in the Enterprise goes up. Enterprises narrow down the list of "approved" vendors to only the larger vendors and they apply much more stringent critera for approving projects. During this type of environment, vendors huddle together for safety and these hype cycles take a longer time to develop. During this kind of elongated time frames, it become easy for critics to take "pot shots" at the coalitions, especially since most coalitions consist of a cluster of strong and weak players. Some of the weaker players huddling under the SOA banner make themes like SOA easy targets for critics. "SOA is dead", "Cloud is Water Vapor" and "Enterprise 2.0 what a Crock" have variously been said of these three IT trends.
Why SOA makes sense even in recessionary times
And a few of the trends make the logic of Service Orientation more compelling
- "Use what you have" becomes a key. Getting the most out of the IT infrastructure you have becomes a battle cry for the Finance group. This means a "leave and layer" approach to developing new IT capabilities. "Rip and Replace" goes out of fashion. Finance will not buy IT any fancy new toys until it shows that it can play with the ones it already owns
- Consolidation becomes attractive. Any redundancy or perceived redundancy in IT systems is looked at as an opportunity for consolidation. Where there were two, now there is one. This is where the concepts of "rationalization" and "reusability" come from.
- IT becomes more centralized. Instead of having dozens of buyers, central IT buys infrastructure in bulk. Just like a recessionary family buys in bulk at CostCo, a recessionary enterprise buys IT in bulk. Do the business units get as much say about the brands it prefers and features? No, but by amassing all purchases through central IT, the costs go down. The procurement office rises to ascendency.
- Opportunity Cost becomes important: The criteria changes from "let's do it!" to "is this the best use of our time/resources?" Opportunity cost becomes a serious issue since multiple projects compete for the same penny. "Software Portfolio Management" becomes more popular.
In geology, heat and pressure make diamonds (which we know last "forever"). But periods of prolonged cooling produce sedimentary rock—rock that is formed from layers.
But at the same time IT begins cooling off, the Business World is also cooling. Large enterprises are forced to compete in more mature markets.
Business gets Process-Oriented
The definition of a recession is multiple quarters of negative growth. So the impact to the business as a whole is either less growth or negative growth.
During the throes of such recessionary trends, one naturally sees a shift from product innovation to process innovation. After World War I, Henry Ford developed the Assembly Line that radically altered the field of Business Process Management and the Assembly Line created process flow visibility by making inefficient segments of the assembly line obvious to any observer. This innovation excelled at creating non-differentiated commodity products. Henry Ford said of his Model –T "you can have any color you like as long as it's Black". The industrial growth sparked by this and other such innovations launched the "Roaring Twenties" economic boom.
Across the Pacific, another stalwart in Business Process Management, Toyota uses Kaizen (continuous process improvement) to transform itself from a producer of the "Toyoda Model G Automatic Loom" into a car company.
Difficult economic times provide impetus for a significant push around "Business Process Management". The emergence of Business Process projects on the business side has led directly to the connection between SOA and BPM. Early efforts to connect SOA and BPM through standards such as BPEL fell quite short when practitioners realized that what business people thought of as their processes were not represented by such low level programming languages. Although BPEL served its purpose as a low level orchestration flow language and a declarative way to express endpoint semantics, true business processes were not expressible in BPEL leading to the rise of such efforts as BPMN and others.
Business shifts to Niche or Vertical Markets
It's a well known fact that as companies mature and markets mature, growth slows. So how do organizations compete in slower and more mature markets? The best contemporary description of product marketing for mature markets can be found in Geoffrey Moore's book "Dealing with Darwin: how great companies innovate at every phase of their evolution."
In this book Moore describes a mature market where product and service fragments into niches as a "Fractal Market". He suggests that once a market is saturated with a single product, that product competition drives niche product development and creation of products with (for consumer) narrower demographics or (for enterprise) more verticalized solutions. The example he provides is that once every household has a "regular" telephone, the market is forced to product dozens of niche variations including car phones, cell phones, game phones, PDA's, camera phones, etc.
An extreme form of niche marketing was documented in Chris Anderson's book "The Long Tail". Prior to this book, the organizational focus on the Pareto Distribution was on the top 20% of the customer base that makes up 80% of the revenue. The "head" end of the distribution curve deserved the lion's share of attention simply because focusing on a smaller number of customers costs less, and empowering those customers gains you 80% of your revenue.
In "The Long Tail", Chris Anderson explores the 80% of customers that typically account for only 20% of revenue. By studying internet giants such as EBay and Amazon, he explored the potential of the "long tail" and the ability for organizations to focus on serving the 80% of the customers on the "other side" of the Pareto distribution.
The inherent problem with serving such customers is being able to differentiate products at a finer level of granularity, essentially niche marketing. One solution to this problem is to develop a core set of "platform" services that can be used and recombined in billions of possible ways, and by pushing those combinations closer to the customer. This means personalization, mass customization, self service and combinatorics. Starbucks coffee, Build-a-bear workshop, Apple iPhone AppStore, FaceBook Apps, eBay Marketplace, Dell.com "custom built" computers and multi-colored iMac Computers and iPods all fall into this category.
Near-infinite consumption patterns with finite provisioning
One of the properties of fractal shapes such as Benoit Mandelbrot's famous "Mandelbrot Set" is that it is a 2 dimensional shape with infinite surface area that bounds a finite volume. In market terms, a product that has "infinite surface area" means that every single consumer experiences the product in a unique way, but the underlying supply chain is the same. An example of this kind of product is Starbuck's coffee. Many millions of possible drinks can be composed (e.g. Venti nonfat sugar-free hazelnut decaf latte with an extra espresso shot, served hot) but these variations do not disrupt the infrastructure requirements to deliver this product at the store. Hot water, milk and coffee beans go to the store and the biggest complexity is maintaining sugar-free hazelnut syrup on site.
In business terms, the same hot water, coffee beans and milk are "mass customized" into millions of different products. Notice the term is not "reused".
So whether business demands process oriented consumption of IT services or other forms of mass customization such as mash-ups, "platform" services, utility services, App Stores or self service, we are talking about the emergence of complex consumption patterns for IT (Complex Demand)
Enter the Alternative IT Provider
Business has complex demands for IT. If IT is unable to supply this demand, a host of alternative sources of IT capabilities emerge. Among these include traditional outsourcing, Cloud Computing, Offshoring, and a host of emerging options for business leaders.
Although the relationship of the business to an external IT provider is usually more well defined that the relationship of in-house IT to the business, outsourcing is not a panacea.
Other than in smaller organizations, the wholesale outsourcing of all IT functions to external suppliers is not realistic. In cases where only part of the IT portfolio is outsourced, this adds additional complexity to the model. Now organizations must "organize and utilize" capabilities from on-premise and off-premise and manage new organizational agendas. Although external providers of IT may keep internal IT "in check" and force them to compete with aggressive outsiders, ultimately the wholesale outsourcing of IT puts an organization into a vulnerable state where the external provider has an excess of bargaining leverage over the Enterprise.
Complex Demand, Simple Supply
Consider the example of the electricity grid. Although the standardization of the AC power outlet (it's irritatingly heterogeneous across countries) provides for billions of different appliance configurations that can be plugged into it, the supply of electricity is a reasonably homogeneous problem. Although energy has many sources such as fossil fuel, nuclear, solar, wind power, etc, once it has been translated into electricity it has become a commodity.
One rational business response to commodity market is monopoly. We can build an IT delivery system that has a similar complex pattern of consumption but has a large monolithic supplier. If managing a supply chain of heterogeneous IT suppliers becomes too complex and expensive, a monolithic supplier of IT becomes a reasonable alternative.
One example of this is the emergence of the acquisitive Oracle Corporation who is attempting to build a single technology stack to commoditize IT. The problem with this approach is that IT is not a commodity in the sense that electrical power is. The biggest issue is not that an ESB from Oracle is so dramatically different from an ESB from some other company—the issue is that in the provision of electricity, no supplier has extraordinary pricing leverage as a function of high switching cost. So the solution of a monolithic or monopolistic IT provider in order to simplify the complex IT supply chain is a difficult solution. Another problem with this model is that it would require an already heterogeneous IT landscape to "rip and replace" their solutions with those of the commodity provider. Although electricity is highly interchangeable, the history of IT has proven that swapping out IT providers is difficult.
Perhaps a more viable model for simplifying the supply of IT is Cloud Computing. By building very large "utility" companies for IT infrastructure, we can simplify the supply of IT services into the Enterprise. This is an excellent model, and the shift to Cloud Computing enables a huge cost benefit via commoditization and economies of scale. Very large providers of Cloud Computing will emerge and due to the disruptive pricing model, new entrants will likely surpass the old providers in this field.
Simplified delivery of IT capabilities is a wonderful cost-saving device. It's well known that IT in the Enterprise is too complex. Unfortunately, the Enterprise is already filled with heterogeneous and complex IT supply chains and in order to keep the business running, it's difficult (or near impossible) to switch off those systems. One future scenario might be that the inefficiency of complex Enterprise IT is so prohibitive that new business entrants fueled by "clean" utility IT providers in the cloud will outgrow and replace the old Enterprises.
This model does not speak to the logical response of Enterprises to the emerging need to support complex consumption patterns for IT Services. The correct chess move for large dinosaur enterprises is not to roll over and die in favor of small mammal enterprises. It's certainly theoretically possible for large enterprises to "spin out" dozens of agile Cloud-powered mini-me enterprises. But radical moves such as this are typically not well rewarded at the Board and Executive Management level of most large organizations. So Large Enterprises will need to come up with a solution for IT that combines both complex supply as well as complex demand.
Don't get me wrong, Cloud Computing is happening and it's going to happen big. Most if not all large enterprises will have significant investments in Cloud. But most large Enterprises will be unable to rip and replace existing IT infrastructure with a monolithic and simple cloud solution. This results in a complex IT supply with complex demand problem.
Complex Demand, Complex Supply
If you consider the Starbuck's Coffee example, Starbucks sources coffee from many sources all over the world and manages the complex relationships between thousands of suppliers to deliver a well-branded experience to the consumer. Although coffee beans are arguably a commodity like electricity, the ability for Starbucks to offer supply transparency (Shade-grown Fair Trade Ethiopian Coffee Beans) or at least the simulation of transparency to the consumer requires complex supply management practices.
So for IT, how do you take this complex legacy history, complex sources of capability and layer on a new set of capabilities that can be recombined the way Starbucks does with their coffee?
IF you're challenged with a complex IT supply and complex IT demand situation, SOA is the only rational response. In the spirit of InfoQ, again, please feel free to challenge that statement.
If the supply of IT were just a problem of managing monopolistic vendors trying to lock you in, it would still be very challenging. As if that were not hard enough, even within Enterprise IT there is increasing heterogeneity and complexity in providing capabilities to the business.
As described in my free eBook, "SOA Adoption for Dummies", one of the significant challenges in managing in the Enterprise is the existence of "Tribes". A "tribe" is a self-interested organizational unit. Each tribe has its own leadership, budget, priorities, performance metrics, world view, and systems.
Tribes fall into a pattern where they behave in ways that "good for me, bad for you".
This is not garden-variety selfishness. In this difficult economic environment, not only does management obsess about squeezing every dime of value out of every employee, but each group manager is fighting to keep all of their headcount. The combination of draconian measurements and individual contributors trying to save their jobs leaves very little room for thoughts of other groups. The metrics each group are measured by drive that group's behavior and little else.
If you want to talk about complexity of supply, the existence of Tribalism both within and outside of IT organizations dramatically increases the complexity of supply.
Defining SOA
The statement that SOA is the only rational response to these myriad concerns is perhaps overstating the point. Lets explore why.
At this point, the astute reader may wonder if I'm playing fast and loose with the definition of "Service Oriented Architecture". So I would like to refer to the OASIS SOA Reference Model definition, which states: SOA is a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains." (Emphasis added).
How is SOA Different from "Integration"
If the aim of SOA is to "organize and utilize" capabilities, presumably through a "leave and layer" strategy, how is this fundamentally different from Enterprise Integration?
The "baggage" associated with the term "Integration" is simply that it concerns the interoperability and interconnection between systems and applications. While this is certainly a useful set of competencies for SOA, what makes SOA a different layer of abstraction is hinted at in the Reference Model Definition. The notion that the distributed capabilities may be "under the control of different ownership domains" is at the heart of SOA, and in fact poses the greatest challenge to SOA Adoption, the realization of the SOA benefits.
Of course in practice, SOA operates at a higher level of abstraction then Integration, and covers a broader set of agendas… and Integration sophisticates already understand the problem of ownership domains. But it's the reason why we need a new word. Whether we need a new word for SOA in order to dispose of the "baggage" associated with it is subject to debate. InfoQ readers, have at it.
Reining in SOA
The idea that an Architectural paradigm can "organize and utilize" capabilities does seem like a bit of a tall order. This misunderstanding is one of the failings of SOA as realized today—that Architecture by itself does not organize and utilize capabilities. Architecture does not produce such effects; Architecture done properly only creates Architectural Blueprints.
An Architectural Blueprint is sometimes referred to as the "To-Be" or "Target State" Architecture. Without an aggressive program of implementation (which is often referred to as "SOA Adoption"), the Blueprint will remain a pipe dream.
So suggesting that SOA (which isn't even an Architecture, it's an Architectural Paradigm) by itself will produce positive business results is like saying that the Postmodern Architectural movement will provide housing for thousands of people. Before you realize the business benefit, you need to instantiate the architecture in the form of your blueprint. Even more to the point, you need to realize your blueprint in the form of SOA Adoption.
The SOA Baby in the Bathwater
If you follow the earlier phrase about not throwing out the SOA Baby with the SOA Bathwater, what fundamental insights do we need to preserve in order for the promised benefits of SOA to realized?
Let's go back to the definition and the words "ownership domain". The realization that the distributed capabilities may have different owners changes the equation from technical "reusability" into a problem of creating a framework of agreements that support sharing.
What about reuse?
The concept of "rationalizing silos" speaks to the idea that we have one service instead of two. You could look at it as that single service being "reused" two times.
This is a fairly unproductive way of looking at it.
What gets people's blood moving these days is the idea of "good use of time/resources". Reuse is such a dead tired word that it hardly ever gets people interested in SOA. We spoke earlier about "Entropy"—the amount of energy in a system that is unavailable for work. Another way to describe it is waste.
If you take a look at the "good use of time/resources" measurement, any project that:
- Produces a redundant function (bad use of your time)
- Will be thrown away (bad use of your time)
- That is limited to one business use case (bad use of your time)
- Produces a security risk (bad use of someone else's time)
- Crashes or otherwise fails (bad use of someone else's time)
It's typical for someone who is part of a siloed organization to not care as much about other people's time—this is a natural product of working in a large enterprise where responsibility is diffused. It becomes "somebody else's problem". Ultimately it results in lots of waste—code being ripped out, underused, marginalized, consolidated and otherwise wasted.
Complexity is not the Enemy, Entropy is
We spoke earlier about the complex supply and demand challenges facing IT. The complexity of Enterprise IT is a direct function of the size and longevity of the Enterprise. Although size and complexity is correlated with failure, complexity itself is not the enemy, Entropy and waste are the enemy. When we look at a system that converts energy into form, we can take inspiration from the Biosphere. The Biosphere takes in solar energy and converts it into all forms of life on earth in its tremendous complexity. Complexity in the biosphere is a measure of its strength, adaptability, scale and resilience. One could argue that Enterprise IT is a "closed system" and therefore does not have the boundless solar energy input needed to reverse local Entropy as we see in the earth's Biosphere. But that argument doesn't hold water—Enterprise IT continuously takes in energy in the form of IT budget expenditure. Large Enterprises simply aren't known for "pulling the plug" on IT, and in the most extreme cases will simply outsource as much of it as possible—but energy is still being expended. Much like the Biosphere, complexity is a measure of success—it demonstrates the ability to support tremendous business variation and for an organization to attack a larger number of economic niches. Those who hate "complexity" often confuse organic complexity (which is simply a beneficial form of complexity that they just don't understand) with overcomplexity. They may try to drive the system into a state of oversimplicity. Both overcomplexity and oversimplicity are forms of waste and therefore Entropic.
Services hide complexity
The concept of a "service" is simply the notion that consumers are shielded from the complexity of the implementation. Because of this, SOA can be seen as a way of hiding complexity. Hiding organic complexity can be useful in situations where the total system complexity makes visualizing solutions difficult for the business. However, in a business context being "shielded" from complexity essentially means abdicating control over the situation. There's actually nothing wrong with abdicating control over a process in the business world, as long as you trust the provider or the framework of accountability. What I mean by the framework of accountability is that we "trust" that other drivers on the road will not smash into us because we "trust" that they do not want their insurance premiums to go up and the hassle of having to deal with a crash. Similarly, provider/consumer contracts can provide a framework within which consumers don't have to explicity trust a given provider but can trust the framework of accountability.
But they require trust
Ultimately, the trust issue is the biggest stumbling block for SOA. What we've learned is that lack of trust in business is tremendously expensive. The speed, coordination and agility exhibited by high performing teams is a function of trust—team members pass a ball or puck to where they "know" their teammate will be—without having to look. Lack of trust means that agility grinds to a halt. Everything must be verified, double checked and legislated. There's an old saying that if people are pulling contracts out of the filing cabinet to re-read them, it's a sign that the business relationship is ending. Similarly, in SOA overgovernance can produce as much entropy as undergovernance. Ultimately it comes down to waste, waste is the enemy.
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Business Transformation
miko matsumura
Writing a bit about Business Transformation here on my blog also:
My 2 cents,
Just one word, upgradeability
Jean-Jacques Dubray
thanks for this great article, however, the central focus of SOA is missing: upgradeability. It is not surprising, all IT vendors have failed at providing "upgradeable" capabilities and this translated into building IT assets that themselves have been very difficult to upgrade, version, maintain... Lots of companies have actually adopted an "immutable" strategy to their SOA. What an oxymoron !
Could you imagine for a second if the physical world was built of immutable services? Could imagine each time your shipping, banking, commerce... services had to "copy paste" and keep a bunch of immutable versions?
Ludicrous, right? Yet this is all the vendors have provided, this all the pundits and analysts have recommended? SOA dies from a lack of upgradeability. The Cloud thrives from making "upgradeability" someone else's problem. If a SaaS, PaaS or IaaS vendor fails at providing a forward compatible versioning strategy, this vendor will quickly disappear.
IT started to die the day the "maintenance" business model emerged. Who in their right mind would pay 20% a year for a vendor to focus on new customer acquisition and never ever provide sustainable upgradeability paths.
Beyond, that, there is nothing specific about the "failure" of SOA. It is computer science which has failed to understand the implication of architecture. We are still building software like we were doing it in the 60s, yet somehow we keep changing everything every so often. Who in their right mind would write business logic that relies on APIs that have a lifespan of less than 24 months? How many companies have software running that is out of support? What is the cost (entropy, I think you say) of simply trying to remain within support without taking advantage of the "new" stuff.
Take any product from any vendor and calculate the cost of migrating from Vn to Vn+1, including the 20% spent. Then you understand the size of the problem. You understand why there is no other way than:
a) centralizing upgradeability (Cloud)
b) creating programming models that are independent of architecture (i.e. writing business logic that can survive the elements of architecture it relies on)
Who in their right mind would continue the course that vendors inflicted on IT for the last 20 years? IT will cease to exist unless upgradeability becomes the central focus of our entire industry. SOA was the first paradigm and set of technology that supported a forward compatible versioning approach, yet no single vendors talked about it. There is no need to "revive" SOA is you are going to keep upgradeability behind. Same approach will yield same results.
>> ... the transformation aspect is about managing both IT complexity with SOA and business
>> complexity with WOA, Web 2.0, Mash ups, Business Processes, composite apps, and various forms of
>> reusability.
Come on Miko, can we stop this kind of talk? can we stop the sexy TLAs, pumped for a few months? can we tackle the real technical challenges of upgradeability and architecture independent programming models? Can we bring Model Driven Engineering to the masses? It is not a bunch of acronyms, no matter how sexy they look.
We don't need alternatives, we need focus.
(I am not just writing this for you, but for all vendors)
Re: Just one word, upgradeability
miko matsumura
as usual, good insightful contribution from you! I appreciate your feedback always.
I happen to agree with you about upgrade-ability--but I see the problem as being complex from an evolutionary perspective. Youre right that vendors are to blame for many ills, but the market has created a system where risk, cost and complexity are pushed across all sorts of organizational boundaries, not just between vendor and customer. In some ways the promise of SaaS is the notion that a stable interface can be defined and that "upgrades" just flow forth in a way that is hidden from the user, save for an improvement of the customer experience.
This is a lovely notion, but it hasnt been put to the test of time... The key is the establishment of a stable interface, as this is the region that gets disrupted by fast-changing innovation. I like the trend towards IOC frameworks that enable an evolutionary pattern of dynamic package management--but see this as a half-measure.
This is why Software AG has embraced agile development methodology across all R&D and why we are rearchitecting our own products using IOC, particularly with OSGi.
As far as the "Business Transformation" buzzword, I apologize for it. I just feel that a discourse needs to emerge around improving Enterprise business performance through a combination of management and technology.
Focus is good, but too few people understand the methodology of implementation.
Re: Business Transformation
Paul Nita
At the beginning of the project Enterprise Architects are mandated by senior management to produce SOA blueprints and governance frameworks. These mandates result in great looking diagrams and documents and some some expensive tools purchased but then they are not followed by any real adoption in practice. In the end systems are implemented and delivered in the 'old' way: huge waterfall project management, missed deadlines, buget oveflows, poor code quality, system crashes in production, disatisfied customers. The excuses I hear often are "systems complexity", "aggresive timelines", "people have not enough training", etc. Yes, systems are more complex today than 10 or 20 years ago while business evolved and expanded and user expectations are much higher. However,imho the root cause of failure is of organizational nature, in the way business and IT is structured in silos with poor communication and execution.
Re: Business Transformation
miko matsumura
The word "SOA Governance" is itself an anathema because it smacks to people of:
* Huge and Cumbersome
* Rigid and Unchanging
* Invasive and Oppressive
This is very problematic!!! The fundamental premise of a service is the offer to hide complexity for a consumer in exchange for trust--for the purpose of producing manegability.
Trust is an absolute necessity in organization simply because no single human being is capable of understanding the complete complexity of Enterprise IT. I mean a single person can spend their whole career lifetime studying just Microsoft products (for example) and this would only be a small fraction of the whole Enterprise.
So we need to trust the experts--and also to EMPOWER them. This is the principle of kaizen which is the management principle used by Toyota to create a continuously evolving organization. Evolution is made possible through extremely short cycle times for improvement, and respect for each individual as the expert in their area of specialization. Nobody knows more than that individual about how to improve their own work environment.
SOA Governance is about directly attacking the problems of Enterprise Scale systems--that today we have a complex dance of risk, cost and complexity arbitrage between organizations (yes, including vendors JJ), individuals (including C-level executives) and individuals. Today the Enterprise is a dumping ground for complexity and risk that individuals and groups within the Enterprise manage to eschew--resulting in large catastrophic failures of implementation.
If SOA Governance itself becomes part of the problem and not part of the solution, we must dispose of it along with all the other rubbish in the Enterprise. The principles that will enable its revitalization (or ultimate demise) will be to ensure that SOA Governance policies evolve at a high rate of speed, that short cycles of optimization result and that individuals are entrusted and empowered--but within a framework that prevents abusive arbitrage of risk, cost and complexity towards individual gain at the cost of the whole.
We have been failing at this over a long time. The recent Deloitte study shows that since 1965 the Return-on-Asset of US Public Companies has declined by %75. This number is even worse for Telecommunications and Technology companies.
bit.ly/7DQEzx (link to 200 page PDF, click if you want to have it)
Reversing this miserable performance may help in the much grander objective of elevating our economies out of recession. If SOA Governance hinders this effort, then good riddance to bad rubbish, but we will still need a way to create scalable frameworks for trust across organizations within and outside of the Enterprise.
My 2 cents,
Re: Business Transformation
ash galal
In Computer Science upgradeability means:
a. To replace (a software program) with a more recently released, enhanced version.
b. To replace (a hardware device) with one that provides better performance.
This is the core advantages of SOA and loosely coupled modules.
This is also the one of the WS-I goals.
We cannot achieve it if we use RPC style communication but we can achieve it very easily if we use the document style that encapsulates the messages and the data.
With Document style, a change in the structure of a message (like, adding a new attribute) does not affect the document exchange mechanisms.
On the other hand, a change in a back-end (internal) method signature has generally no effect upon the messages structure.
This loose coupling, intrinsic in the Document style, leads to more robust and reliable architectures that are easier to maintain, and having a modular aspect.
This is why it is better to design service at a fine-grained and composite them together.
If we do so, we can easily achieve the immutable service and any changes will only be done on the composite services, version..etc.
We will not have any management problems with composite services because we can discard any of them and rebuild them from scratch without even affect the underlying services.
The resistance from the IT is the among one of the major problems that cause and led to SOA failure.
SOA is a concept and best practice, vendors cannot do more than educating and training but the best practice and concept have to be followed by someone in the organizations, except if we have the vendor take over all the activities from the organizations.
This is could be done by SaaS / cloud computing but the problem that this model will not be successful without having a good SOA infrastructure in place.
IT has to regognize that we had a paradigm shift since 2002 toward assembly not development
Thank you
Ashraf Galal
Re: Business Transformation
miko matsumura
I certainly agree that loose coupling will enhance the ability of the Enterprise to replace components in principle. The key is to understand which components are causing the most pain and need upgrading or replacing. Like someone who needs a hip replacement surgery, the parts that are causing the most pain are the parts that the Enterprise is most motivated to replace. At a technical level, of course document style is more declarative and loosely coupled, and we've experienced a shift from RPC for that reason towards a more internet style doc style. The concern expressed by JJ is more about monolithic enterprise applications and the difficulty to update them. For example, there are still many users on SAP R2 and there will continue to be for at least the next few decades. The business logic trapped in these applications is very hard to replicate. So I wanted to support what JJ said that vendors do need to work on upgradability and do believe that this is a major effort at most vendors. So I think the debate is a legitimate one, just at a different granularity than you imagine.
I think a vendor can do much more than either "take over" all the activities from the organization or stand on the sidelines and educate.
Let's start with the premise that Enterprise software is for the most part intended to be deterministic (by which I mean that for the most part Enterprises value the stability and predictability of its behavior) and that 90% of the difficult unpredictability comes from the human side of the equation. Let take one example such as a software dependency that crosses an organizational boundary. In this example, the provider organization can change or decommission the software based on their own interests without consulting the consumer organization. This would result in chaos and downtime for business critical systems and perhaps a ripple effect, but in some ways the provider may not care about impact to consumers. Vendors can provide tooling that help trace dependency and impact so this kind of situation is at least clear to all the participants. It's like having a traffic light at an intersection--the cars can choose to ignore it, but the tooling at least enables and supports enforcement of a trusted framework.
Another example of tool support is tracing fault across organizational boundaries. If a user experiences service degradation in an SLA, they put in a support ticket. Well, if that service crosses multiple organizational boundaries, without the ability to trace fault to root cause in the context of the user experience, you will get a situation where multiple organizations will blame others and the fault will not be resolved. In these cases SOA itself is often blamed even if the fault lies in an underlying system, for example a database server goes down.
So I think it extreme to say that SOA is entirely a human social issue and nothing to do with technology as it is fashionable to say at the moment. It is also extreme to say that ownership of SOA Governance tooling makes you successful in your implementation. I have long asserted that one illustrative metaphor is the idea that owning a hammer and chisel will never make you into a Michaelangelo. However, you will not see Michaelangelo trying to carve the David out of marble with his bare hands.
If you agree that Governance is necessary to achieve SOA Adoption benefits, you should likely agree that Governance tools (yes, even those supplied by "evil" vendors) are necessary but not by a long stretch sufficient.
Perhaps another way to put is is that service interfaces enable you to hide complexity of implementation in exchange for trust. Initially you can have point to point trust in the form of contracts between individuals. You may even graduate to a culture of trust. But in order to scale you need a framework of trust. If you look again at the traffic system, you dont trust each and every driver on the road, you trust in the rules of the road that are legislated to keep people safe, but also the system that monitors traffic accidents and fatalities to create new adaptations to the laws, the system that regulates traffic such as traffic lights and the system that enforces the laws including police and all the radar, cars, computers and equipment they use. This is how you scale trust into a bigger framework.
I appreciate what you're saying, I just wanted to provide my point of view on some of those points.
My 2 cents,
Re: Business Transformation
Jean-Jacques Dubray
>> This is why it is better to design service at a fine-grained and composite them together.
>> If we do so, we can easily achieve the immutable service and any changes will only be done on the
>> composite services, version..etc.
This is the absolute anti-pattern of SOA. If you think a second about what you have just written, you realize that when you have 500 consumers of these "fine grained" services, you just set up yourself for 500 changes when the changes need to happen in the composite logic. Creating services at the Data Access Layer level is the worst way to approach a Service Oriented Architecture.
SOA is about creating and factoring assets which support upgradability without always/necessarily breaking existing consumers. XML technologies and contract definition mechanisms such as WSDL or ebXML BP are at the core of enabling this upgradability.
Re: Business Transformation
ash galal
You will not have a consumers to this fine grained services directly. These fine-grained services is composed into a business processes.
If there is a change in the composite business process simply, ignore it and build a new composite service from scratch which will not affect the fine-grained services that were used in the first expired composite.
The fact that objects are serialized and deserialized to and from an XML stream, most structural changes can be introduced with zero-impact.
I did not mention any thing about the creating services at the data access layer, I am still in the high-level view, although there should be some services of course on the data access layers too when we dig down into technical details.
For example, in a document/liter wrapped style, we might have a an outcome class that has two attributes: returnMessage and returnCode.
There are some consumers who bind to it.
We will add a new attribute "other", to it.
The server module can now assign a value to the new attribute and the clients that update to the new outcome class can receive that value.
But what about the clients who do not update? Well, they will continue to work in the same way.
They will obviously not be receiving the new value, but the deserialization process will not break.
On the other side, we can remove an attribute (for example, returnMessage) in the server module, and have a non-updated client receive a null value in this field, though still working.
The document/literal wrapped style offers a new paradigm for thinking different than the one that we have got to use it, the RPC one.
Re: Business Transformation
miko matsumura
Having just got off the phone with JJ (on a previously scheduled matter involving a large financial institution) I am inspired to weigh in on the conversational thread here.
One of the great frustrations of SOA Architects in this day and age is the discussion of appropriate architectural patterns. The reason for the frustration is that even after 10 or more years of effort, we continue to have conversations where the architects seem to pass each other like ships in the night. One of the main reasons for this is the efforts to scope granularity of a given pattern.
Composing fine-graned services is generally now referred to as "Orchestration" rather than "Business Process". The original confusion may have arisen because of the use of BPEL ("Business Process Execution Language") for such orchestrations. Unfortunately, BPEL or other low level integration orchestration languages rarely result in anything that a business person would recognize as a "Business Process". Interesting, the orchestration of low level technical services using capabilities such as BPEL often produce single coarse-grained services that are referred to as "Business Services". Once you reach the business level of granularity, composition of these higher level components can then be proposed as "Business Processes". But unfortunately, there's even another level of granularity to consider, which is the concept of whether the process is within or across a single department or business unit. As soon as a "Business Process" crosses a business unit boundary, it must be treated differently (from an optimization and continuous improvement perspective) than a departmental business process.
I say all of this not to further confuse readers, but just to say that one of the most accursed and frustrating things about architectural patterns (as opposed to say, object oriented patterns) is that differing granularities frequently call for different patterns and that the blanket statements that Architects so love sometimes turn to mush as you span multiple granularities.
I write about this problem in my blog post "On the Inside of an SOA, it's too Dark to Align with the Business"
So I respond to vent a little frustration, but also to hopefully advance the cause of Architectural consistency by awakening people to this communication problem. Lets compare apples to apples please.
Best Regards,
Of course there is an alternative to SOA
John Schlesinger
"I challenge anyone to either
1. Propose a viable alternative that addresses the problem of "Enterprise Architecture Syndrome" as defined below."
There is, and has been for a long time, an alternative with many successful implementations. Recently this has gone under the name Staged Event Driven Architecture (SEDA). You can read about it at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_event-driven_archi.... InfoQ has a very interesting presentation from the BNP Paribas team that built their market risk system (see it at www.infoq.com/presentations/Risk-System-Harper-...) which they (correctly I believe) characterise as SEDA. This processes 100 million transactions a day.
In my work I have used SEDA for a market regulation system handling 10 million transactions a day, the architecture of a huge capital markets trading middle office, the architecture of a large north American retail bank, and the architecture of a large European bank. I have a colleague using SEDA to re-architect a large European postal service.
However, SEDA is for the management of transactions once they have been captured into a record keeping system. It is not appropriate for managing how those transactions get entered in the first place (almost always by people). Remember that systems are about people interacting with systems and systems interacting with systems. SEDA is for the latter not the former. Actually, I find that most of the confusion within SOA is caused by a failure to make this distinction.
For people interacting with systems, particularly if they want to use an agent such as a Web browser for doing this, we have an architectural style that works very well, namely REST. This provides a style (that is, a set of constraints) that work very well for such interactions. REST replaces the previous successful architectural style that was introduced in the late sixties by IMS and CICS (both from IBM, and still running the majority of transactions in the world) called conversational or pseudo-conversational respectively.
I am increasingly introducing REST into application architecture in my work as an Enterprise Architect. It appears to work extremely well if the constraints are indeed complied with. The uniform interface constraint enables caching (all GETs are cacheable) which enormously improves scalability. The 'Hypertext as the engine of state', or HATEOS, constraint beautifully takes advantage of the big difference between people interactions compared with system interactions - that is, the presence of the world's best semantic processor, a human. A computer needs to be told the meaning of every data element, humans can always work it out from context. This eliminates the need for WSDL in these kinds of interactions.
Re: Of course there is an alternative to SOA
miko matsumura
it's always nice to hear from you. I always find it refreshing to learn about your pioneering work on scalable systems.
It's hard for me to comment on SEDA, as I would need to study it at greater length. The results from BNP Paribas look very compelling and I enjoyed their talk on the topic greatly. I can see how scalable the data architecture is and think it's a great achievement. I enjoyed learning about their heatmapping paradigm and their ability to visually display quantitative information such as load. It's a great result, certainly worth more study.
As far as REST, I think you said it yourself wonderfully well. REST in my view is an "application architecture" and not an "Enterprise Architecture". I agree that REST is astonishingly scalable, as we can see from the dominance of the URI encoding system that's been so successful on the Internet. You won't get any argument from me in that respect. But the challenge of Enterprise that I put forth in my article, above, is the challenge of traversing organizational as well as technological boundaries. REST can easily traverse technology silos, but from a perspective of Enterprise Architecture needs a bit more oomph to start to encompass some of the organizational issues faced by Enterprise.
I issued the challenge in earnest, so I'm very perfectly happy to be proven wrong and to eat crow. I enjoy a healthy debate and I issued the challenge on InfoQ because I value the community here and think there's a lot of cultural value placed on this kind of debate.
My 2 cents,


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To qualify for 2013 Top Safety Pick, a vehicle must earn good ratings in the moderate overlap front, side, roof strength and head restraint tests, regardless of its rating in the driver-side small overlap front test.
The Mercedes-Benz E-Class was redesigned for the 2010 model year. Moderate overlap frontal ratings are assigned by the Institute based on a test conducted by Mercedes-Benz as part of frontal crash test verification.
Measures taken from the head, neck, and chest indicate low risk of injuries to these body regions in a crash of this severity. Forces on the right tibia indicate that injuries to the lower leg would be possible. Head acceleration from the roof rail hit was low.
Dummy movement was well controlled. During rebound, the dummy's head hit the roof rail.
How this test is conducted
The Mercedes-Benz E-Class was redesigned for the 2010 model year. Side ratings are assigned by the Institute based on a test conducted by Mercedes-Benz as part of side crash test verification.
Driver — Measures taken from the dummy indicate a low risk of any significant injuries in a crash of this severity.
Passenger — Measures taken from the dummy indicate a low risk of any significant injuries in a crash of this severity.
Driver — The dummy's head was protected from being hit by any hard structures, including the intruding barrier, by a side curtain airbag that deployed from the roof and a side airbag that deployed from the seat.
Passenger — The dummy's head was protected by a side curtain airbag that deployed from the roof.
In the test, the strength of the roof is determined by pushing a metal plate against one side of it at a slow but constant speed. The force applied relative to the vehicle's weight is known as the strength-to-weight ratio. This graph shows how the ratio varied as the test of this vehicle progressed. The peak strength-to-weight ratio recorded at any time before the roof is crushed 5 inches is the key measurement of roof strength.
A good rating requires a strength-to-weight ratio of at least 4. In other words, the roof must withstand a force of at least 4 times the vehicle's weight before the plate crushes the roof by 5 inches. For an acceptable rating, the minimum required strength-to-weight ratio is 3.25. For a marginal rating, it is 2.5. Anything lower than that is poor.
Power leather seats with automatically adjusting head restraints (AHR)
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text:
Review Group Week #251: DAREDEVIL #512
Hey you! Reader! Want to be a part of the GREATEST COMIC BOOK AND GEEK COMMUNITY on the web?! Well, they're not accepting new members, but we'll take anyone here, so why not sign up for a free acount? It's fast and it's easy, like your mom! Sign up today! Membership spots are limited!*
*Membership spots not really limited!
Hey you! Reader! Want to be a part of the GREATEST COMIC BOOK AND GEEK COMMUNITY on the web?! Well, they're not accepting new members, but we'll take anyone here, so why not sign up for a free acount? It's fast and it's easy, like your mom! Sign up today! Membership spots are limited!*
*Membership spots not really limited!
by Garofani Spruzzo » Sun Dec 05, 2010 5:26 pm
Probably, not to be confused with MGS, which is an exclusively charitable not-for-profit organization.
by BlueStreak » Sun Dec 05, 2010 5:33 pm
And has no links to the Review Group whatsoever. None. Really. At all.
by GHERU » Sun Dec 05, 2010 5:35 pmDaredevil 512
A decent ending to a very bad storyline.
Story - 7
Art - 6
total 6.5
by Garofani Spruzzo » Sun Dec 05, 2010 5:43 pm
Even if you've read Shadowland there's not much to say about this comic book, eh?
by GHERU » Sun Dec 05, 2010 11:14 pm
no, not at all
by SilverPhoenix » Mon Dec 06, 2010 1:44 am
Oh there's plenty to say about the Comic Book, but not about the content in the book itself.
by SilverPhoenix » Mon Dec 06, 2010 3:22 amDaredevil #512
This is what happens when something starts out as a review, and turns into something else entirely. As for what it turns into? Just keep reading
It's time for me to completely honest. For the past 2 years I have had a love/hate relationship with Superhero Comics. On one hand, I can say that I love most of the stuff that I've been following seriously since I got back into reading comics. Since 2008, my pull list has consisted books that span from the character defining epics like The Incredible Hercules and Captain America (especially before Reborn), to epic Space Operas like REBELS, Guardians of the Galaxy and NOVA. It has also included refreshingly well told team dramas like X-Factor and Secret Six, along with epic beginnings to legends in the making like Batwoman and Max Damage (Incorruptible), which show that new heroes deserve to have their stories told. Hell, I've even enjoyed such "fun" and "silly" books like the first year of Power Girl and Volume 3 of Exiles, which left a smile on my face each month I picked them up. These books, along with a small stack of others are a significant part of the reason why I enjoy going to my LCS every single week.
Then there is the other side of the coin. The side of the coin I don't like talking about, but is becoming more prevalent (particularly and mostly with the "Corporate Superheroes" in Marvel and DC) with each passing Comic Book Day that goes by. With the revival of my fandom for this medium, I really began to pay attention of the trends that go into writing this genre (and other genres), and with that enlightenment comes the realization of things I don't particularly enjoy. Things such as " Constant Serious Business Shock Tactics (including craploads of blood, rape references, and needless deaths)", "Endless Event Comics", "Franchises Expanding to the Point of Ridiculousness", "Non-Franchise Comics slowly becoming a thing of the past", "Constant Retcons", "Downright Disrespect of Continuity", and "Absolute Decompression due to Trade Writing". At the same time, however, those things don't get to me as this set of issues that make up the foundation of the term that I am dubbing "The Absolute Circle to Nowhere." Symptoms of this issue include the trends just discussed, multiplied by "Character Stagnation/Regression", "Incessant Nostalgia Pandering" and "An Absolute Refusal to change the Status Quo, to the creative detriment to the franchise." The result of "The Absolute Circle" to nowhere creates an atmosphere where most comics simply don't matter, because the characters inside of them will never be allowed to truly change, grow and move on. This isn't to say that all change is good, or that things like Death, Retcons, Events, Trade Writing, and a looser hand on Continuity are inherently bad things within themselves. It's when these things or abused or downright ignored, that you begin to create this trap, something that was on sad display with the latest issue of Daredevil , a series that I have grown to love.
Daredevil #512 serves as a bookend to the Shadowland Storyline, which serves as end to the current 12 year storyline, which took Matt Murdock's pursuit of justice down a road that ended up with everything he worked for after Kingpin ruined his life the first time, totally washed away. In fact, it became so bad that the only thing left for him was the pursuit of Justice and Peace, which took him down a dark road where he became the leader of dark Ninja Clan known as "The Hand", once one of his sworn enemies. Absolute Power Corrupted, and led to the Construction of the Fortress known as Shadowland, and the murdering of his worst enemy in Bullseye. It seemed like Matt Murdock was heading down a road that could cause his permanent rumination, changing his life forever, except that we learned in "Shadowland" #2 that he was possessed by a Beast that feeds on evil. When you understand the nature of Superhero Comics, and take that in for a second, you realize that Matt Murdock had been given a "It wasn't me, it was the Yellow Fear Bug" style out, potentially destroying almost all the lasting impact that a story like this could have. After that, it was no surprise to this reviewer that the storyline slowly degenerated, and became a mess by the time It was over, almost as if the creators knew it wouldn't have any lasting impact in the end. This isn't to say that the overall event was a complete waste of time, as "Shadowland: Power Man" was a great mini-series from start to finish, and even previous issues of the book being reviewed continued to be worth reading, despite the storyline. I guess it was only a matter of time before the slave fell under the weight of its master.
Now this isn't to say that "Daredevil #512" was a completely bad book, not by a long shot. On the surface, the writing and art are still pretty strong in this issue, continuing the trend that was established since the storyline began. By taking the direction of focusing on how people in Matt's life were affected by Shadowland's effects on Hell's Kitchen, it gave grounding to an event that made less and less sense as time went on. From the recap page, however, it's very apparent that the Issue was never meant to have its own identity, as its sole purpose is to serve as clean up for the mess that Shadowland had left. As a result, most of the issue is spent spinning its wheels, wondering what happened to Matt Murdock and sending people off on goose chases that most likely won't mean much of anything in the end. The only events in this book that could have a larger impact on the overall storyline is The Kingpin Assuming Control of "The Hand" and the "Black Panthers" arrival to Hell's Kitchen, with the latter being a wasted opportunity, as he could've played a hand in the preceding storyline, making this transition seem more natural. Instead he's just dropped there without any explanation , something that I hope is rectified, very soon. March Cheehtto's drawings are also very strong, he and Matt Hollingsworth create a world that is both dark and grim, with excellent character detail and life in each picture. The Black Panther pages stand out especially, as T'Challa is drawn in all of his majesty , as he makes an immediate impact on the neighborhood.
When it's all said and done, it's just a shame that Shadowland went down the road it went. Everything that built up to it was well written and illustrated, as we got a logical scenario where Matt Murdock would seize the opportunity to turn "The Hand" into a force for good, without realizing that such power cannot be manipulated in such a manner. Instead we got a storyline that was mostly released in a creatively cynical manner, serving as a tool to solely increase sales volume, without any thought to how it would impact the overall mythos. In conclusion it is my hope that Marvel proves my speculative cynicism about this wrong, and makes this story matter for something. At the same time, it is also my hope that the upcoming shift to this being Black Panther's book will not only serve a lasting impact in T'Challa's storyline, but as a way to solidify his rise to the "A-List" of the Comic Book Character Hierarchy. Should both of these missions be accomplished, then this book would've had some positive creative merit, instead of being a symbol of wasted potential, as it spirals in the "Absolute Circle to Nowhere"
The Verdict:
Story: 5
Art: 8
Accessibility: 2
Final Judgment: 5.5
by Flynn the Pirate » Mon Dec 06, 2010 11:07 amDaredevil #512
Writer: Andy Diggle and Anthony Johnston
Art: Marco Checchetto and Matt Hollingsworth
Alright, let me get this one right out of the way. The absolute highest that this book can possibly score is an eight out of ten. You can call me biased. You can call me vindictive. You can call me me anything you want, but the "Shadowland" tag automatically gets it two whole points deducted. This crossover, which had such a strong beginning and a great build-up, deteriorated very, very quickly into something that, by and large, contaminated every title it happened to spill over into. And while of all the tie-ins, the actual Daredevil title has been generally the best of the comics with the Shadowland banner taped to them, a lot of the slack that it would otherwise receive is removed by the fact that this book is largely part one of a two-part epilogue to the aforementioned event.
This comic is really just a series of vignettes. There's Detective Kurtz, whose attempt to retire after the trauma of dealing with Shadowland is derailed by a final assignment. There's Foggy and Becky arguing over the future of the law firm and whether or not the now-missing Matt Murdock will have any place in that future. There's The Kingpin establishing control over his new army. There's Luke Cage and Iron Fist hunting for signs of Daredevil and making an interesting discovery. There's Dakota North confronting a recuperating Black Tarantula about his involvement in the Shadowland fiasco. And finally there's Matt Murdock himself, who has fled New York for somewhere in the Southwest in hopes of finding redemption.
Now, I appreciate that Andy Diggle is trying to tie a nice bow on this steaming pile of mediocre-to-utterly-disappointing drivel, but he falls very quickly into a lot of the same problems that many epilogue issues do. Specifically, this issue does little more than a lot of characters standing around saying, "Man, didn't whatever just happened really suck?", followed by a set-up for whatever status quo change or event is coming next. This really isn't so much a story as it is an attempt to give Shadowland and ending on top of the one that Shadowland #5 got unto itself. Even the much-lauded revelation on the last page does little to add to the story writ large. And like so much of this crossover, this is undermined by the knowledge that ANOTHER epilogue comes out next week, written by the co-writer of this issue Anthony Johnston.
The artwork, on the other hand, is and has been one of the strongest qualities of the Daredevil title. Checchetto and Hollingsworth do an admirable job on that front, though I still think De La Torre was the stronger of the two pencilers working on this title. Still, the book has a very gritty look that feels entirely appropriate to the tenor of the story being told. A good showing.
Yet no matter how nice the book looks, I cannot overlook the flaws in this book. Moreover, as the bookend (sorry, the first part of the bookend) to a thoroughly underwhelming event story, it has the responsibility to trying to bring closure to the story and to validate the time and energy devoted to it. It doesn't. At all. In fact, the only closure to be found here is that Shadowland is finally over. Except that it's not.
Art: 6.5
Story: 3
Overall Score: 4.75 of 10
by Daringd » Mon Dec 06, 2010 11:35 amThought it was an Okay issue nothing great but better than Shadowland #5 was for sure. The art was really nice besides that eh. Andy Diggle really dropped the ball.
by Punchy » Mon Dec 06, 2010 2:10 pmDaredevil #512 - 'Shadowland' - Diggle, Johnston, Checchetto & Hollingsworth
Story - Perhaps the most disheartening thing about Shadowland is the fact that after 10 straight years, the reader was for once outside Matt Murdock's head, throughout all of recent 'Golden Age Of Daredevil', under the pens of Kevin Smith, Brian Michael Bendis and Ed Brubaker, Matt Murdock was front and centre, we were getting his thoughts, the book was about him. But then Shadowland rolled around, and suddenly we're not getting any of that internal story, we're all external, and as Daredevil went around doing crazy shit like killing Bullseye and taking over New York, we weren't getting something we were used to, which was Matt Murdock's voice and motivation, and it just didn't feel right.
Of course there was a reason for this, in that internally, Matt wasn't really himself, and had been in fact possessed by 'The Beast', so this externalisation probably did serve a purpose, but it robbed Shadowland of the most important part of any Daredevil, which isn't Ninjas or Lawyering, but character. This is why Daredevil #512 is partly a return to form as much as an ending, and it's also why despite Shadowland being so lacklustre, I am cautiously optimistic about what the future holds.
This issue serves as a coda to the big throwdowns in Shadowland #5, with Diggle and Antony Johnston setting up where the Daredevil cast will be from now on. We get Detective Kurtz, we get Foggy and Becky, we get Dakota North and Black Tarantula and we get the Kingpin. These are fairly quiet vignettes, heavy on dialogue and light on action, and that character focus even on characters who aren't Matt Murdock is welcome, the Daredevil book has done a good job of making the human characters shine during the ridiculous events of Shadowland and that looks set to continue.
But where will it continue? As we all know, starting next issue, Daredevil is being renamed to 'Black Panther: The Man Without Fear' as T'Challa steps into the Hell's Kitchen breach. Diggle and Johnston, along with Checchetto do a good job at playing coy with whoever it is Luke Cage and Iron Fist spot, and it's a shame the Black Panther reveal was spoiled by the solicitations such a while back, because it would have been a great surprise to read this with no prior knowledge.
I started this review by talking about how important Matt Murdock is to any Daredevil story, and he has been conspicuous by his absence in this issue so far, but the characters have noticed it to, every character, whether it's Iron Fist or Detective Kurtz, is asking the same question, 'Where is Matt Murdock?' and in the last two pages of this issue we get our answer.
Lettering is one of the most underlooked aspects of comics, without it, comics would be nothing, and this issue provided one of the most obvious examples of that fact, the final scene with Matt puts us right back inside the head we missed throughout the 5 long months of Shadowland, and crucially, it uses the exact same caption boxes used for Matt throughout Ed Brubaker's run. I don't know who is to thank for this, did Diggle and Johnston request it? Or was it letterer Joe Caramagna by himself? Maybe it was the editor? But either way it was an effective way of bringing the feel of a proper Daredevil story back, I can't deny it, I missed those boxes and I missed being inside Matt Murdock's thoughts, those last 2 pages were a brilliant moment, and almost despite myself I am excited for Daredevil: Reborn. Diggle has shook things up, now it's time for him to really do the hard stuff and get to grips with Daredevil himself.
Art - Marco Checchetto has done a good job on Daredevil for a while, alternating arcs and issues with Roberto De La Torre, and while their two styles are not particularly similar, credit must go to colourist Matt Hollingsworth for providing a uniform palette, Hollingsworth has been on Daredevil for ages now, and is an integral part of the book for me.
Best Line - I really liked this exchange between Luke Cage and Black Panther; 'Hell's Kitchen ain't your Neighbourhood, Brother' 'It is now. Spread The Word'. BP:MWF is going to be awesome.
by S.F. Jude Terror » Mon Dec 06, 2010 2:13 pmI find it difficult to review this book after SIlverPhoenix's review, which really said it all.
by BlueStreak » Mon Dec 06, 2010 2:21 pmThis page of Review Group will be known as the Detailed Analysis Page, sponsored (not really) by MCS and MGS.
by Zero » Mon Dec 06, 2010 2:21 pm
This is usually true every week.
by Starlord » Mon Dec 06, 2010 3:07 pmDaredevil #512
This particular issue was actually quite enjoyable. If I haven't heard so much negative about this arc, this particular issue would intrigue me enough to have wanted to read it. I didn't need to know much of anything to appreciate this bookend for what it was.
The ending was a big "Hulkish" but I found nothing wrong with these twenty some pages. GREAT ART!
Story: 8
Art: 10
My Score: 8.75
by guitarsmashley » Mon Dec 06, 2010 8:17 pmDaredevil? More like shit devil. This was a seriously dumb comic. Granted I walked into in the last 10 minutes of what sounds like a dumb movie but the whole thing just sounds bad and the art is still bad fake Maleev.
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An excerpt from Laurence Freeman OSB, "Dearest Friends," Christian Meditation Newsletter, Vol 35, #2, July 2011, pp. 4-5.
Global media wallpapers our life with the problems of the world in which we are meant to see our own issues reflected.
The danger of this is that we become desensitized and less capable of compassion, real attention and caring for others. Our hearts harden. Or, we become disconnected from our own issues and take flight from reality in a virtual world. So, the first step to true care is to sit and face ourselves without judgment or comparison. We may feel waves of shame or sadness, grief or anger. These we must accept but we should dismiss the self-indulgent temptations of guilt. Stillness gradually bestows detachment from our problems. It saves us from having to wallow in them, like water-buffalo, in the mud of self-centeredness. Constantly turning over our problems obsessively is exhausting and can be a sign of mental disease. If we see that we are unable to detach from our problems we need to seek care.
But generally we have some measure of control. We can let go of our worries and anxieties as Jesus advises us in his teaching on prayer. These anxieties are manifold, the daily glitches that pass with a good night's sleep, the losses that are still awfully present when we awaken, the deeper patterns of our character with their roots in pre-conscious memory. Wisdom and forgiveness begin their work as soon as we step back from them and stop blaming the world or our parents or our enemies and realize that we are the problem. This first step on a mature spiritual path may take years. Once taken, however, we are able to discern the different levels of suffering and dissatisfaction we have to work through, those we can handle ourselves, those we have to seek help for and those we simply have to transcend.
Meditation sharpens and accelerates this discernment. In all traditions deep, silent, non-conceptual prayer is seen to occupy the heart of faith and to open the door to union with God. The Sufis speak of 'dhikr' or the remembrance of God which is arrived at through the repetition of the name of God. In its simplicity it is said to contain all forms of prayer and 'frees us from all confusion and discomfort'. The Qu'ran reminds us that 'no object is worthy of worship except God' and therefore there is no other ultimate goal or real existence. Seeing this, we also see why we should 'attach no value to anything you have lost…but never lose your time'. Jesus' commandment of love – God, neighbor and self – and the urgency of his teaching tone similarly translate into the mindfulness with which we pay absolute attention to God. We can then willingly sell all we have in the sheer joy of finding the treasure of the Kingdom buried in our heart.
Nevertheless, the cares of life easily overwhelm us. They can make us self-fixated, forgetful, insensitive, ignorant and stupid. We forget that God exists. We ignore the needs of our neighbors. We lose the capacity for wonder. We sleepwalk to the grave. Ascesis – spiritual work – is the cure for the careworn. It teaches us to handle problems and to live in freedom despite them. It dissolves hardness of heart as we become more sensitive and responsive, more open to the beauty of the world and the needs of others including those who greedily grab before they ask. Ascesis – like our twice-daily meditation – transforms the energy blocked in our ego and negative patterns of thought and behavior. Wisely we come to accept that we will not - in this life of cares - ever have everything we want. But then liberation dawns as we accept that the real problem lies not in the not-having but in the wanting itself.
After meditation: W.S. Merwin, "To the Unfinished," THE NATION, April 14, 2003.
Clear eminence without whom I would be
nothing oh great provision never seen
barely acknowledged even wished away
without thinking
you in whose immeasurable presence
the darkness itself comes to be itself
and light recalls its colors and each sound
comes echoing
your undertone I have forgotten when
I first woke into knowing you were there
before words ever reached me but that time
under your wing
is still with me you have carried it all
the way along with faces that surface
appearing almost as they were before
and with the spring
that returns through its leaves never the same
you have brought me once more to the old house
after all these years of remembering
without knowing
it was you who kept opening the way
offering me what I had to choose it is
you who come bringing me the only day
in the morning
Carla Cooper - email@example.com


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MISS Oxfordshire organisers kicked model Georgia Eden out of last night's competition after discovering she posted this topless 'selfie' picture she put online to promote the fight against breast cancer.
The 22-year-old was told images, in which she is covering her breasts and was posted before she even entered Miss Oxfordshire, was contrary to the competition's rule 3 in that it brought the event into disrepute.
The professional model, who entered Miss Oxfordshire on April 1, said she tweeted the image twice in late March with the hashtages #coppafeel (a campaign fundraising for the condition) and #breastcancerawareness after losing a close friend to the disease last year.
Miss Eden added she had been asked to support the cause by her London modelling agency Mode, with whom she has a strictly "no-topless" contract.
The Abingdon resident said: "I am quite upset by this accusation against my character, I feel demeaned. I have been made to feel cheap. The photo is implied topless – there are no nipples on show.
"This is my career, I wouldn't have posed the photo if I thought there was anything wrong with it. I have never ever posted a topless image. I have never even gone topless on a beach."
But yesterday organiser Beverley O'Neill said she believed Miss Eden's pictures showed she was "not suitable" for Miss Oxfordshire, which held its final last night in Witney.
On Wednesday, Ms O'Neill emailed Miss Eden: "It has been brought to the attention of Miss England that you have previously posted semi-naked photographs on social media. This contravenes rule 3, do not bring the Miss England contest or its sponsors into disrepute.
"As a result I regret to inform you that we will be unable to accept your further participation in the event."
Mrs O'Neill told the Oxford Mail: "This woman has got her boobies all over the place.
"She is all over social media with these pictures of herself... she wants to be a glamour model she is into all that stuff, Loaded and I don't even know what. It is worlds apart from our contest. She may have made a mistake but you can't be in a beauty pageant and a page three model, they are completely different worlds.
"The Miss England representative has to be someone of a certain calibre and she is not suitable."
Miss England area organiser Diane Slater said she believed there had been full frontal images but could not provide evidence of this. Miss Eden denied this out of hand.
Ms Slater added that even Miss Eden's 'selfie' image was enough though to contravene competition rules.
In the past weeks, Miss Eden and other contestants had their photos on the Miss Oxfordshire website, and the public were invited to pay £1 each to vote for the girls. Miss Eden said she had 52 votes.
Boyfriend Kieran Cochrane, 22, an Abingdon United footballer, said: "One-hundred per cent, this doesn't make sense. She took this photo herself, to help a charity.
"She is a beautiful girl, and was doing really well as a model, so when this happened she was really annoyed and upset."
Coppafeel is a campaign that promotes the for women to regularly check their breasts for signs of cancer.
- See Monday's Mail for full results.
- SHOULD GEORGIA HAVE BEEN KICKED OUT? Join the debate. Email email@example.com


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There's no better way to get the scoop on the latest toys for the holidays than from the kids themselves. Here, Long Island Kidsday reporters test and rate the hottest new toys of the season. (Ratings are based on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best.)
Ever After High Magic Mirror
Ever After High Magic Mirror (Cartwheel Kids)
The Ever After High Magic Mirror is a mysterious looking toy. It has two make-up drawers and comes with a lip gloss locket. There are buttons you can press that light up the mirror and answers 22 questions that can reveal your destiny. For example "What would you like to be?" and it gives you an answer! I would use it to put on make-up so ages 9 and up would be better. Also, it would be fun making silly faces in the mirror. I think kids who watch the TV cartoon show "Ever After High" would like to play with it because it has so many things to explore. It was fun to play with.
Ages 9+
Rating 4 -- Tavana Record, Central Islip
My Girl's Dollhouse
My Girl's Doll House
We reviewed this gigantic and amazing My Girl's Doll House. This was the biggest doll house that we have ever seen. Even we can even fit inside it. We put our school puppets inside it. You would need really big dolls to go with the mansion. It weighs about 70 pounds and we had our school staff help put it together. We think you can really make it look even more like home if you add lights and wallpaper. It would be so much fun to decorate. As you can see from the picture, it is 6-feet tall and 5-feet wide. Your dolls will love their new home. We loved it.
Ages 3+
Rating 5 -- Allison Milla, Gersenda Gomez and Ashley Gonzalez, Central Islip
My Monopoly
My Monopoly (Hasbro)
If you like to pretend you're rich and would like to buy many houses and garages, My Monopoly is a game for you. This game came with a lot of parts but it was easy to set up. It comes with game pieces that are little people, cards and fake money, but what makes this game different from other Monopoly sets is it comes with a My Monopoly app lets you print out stickers to make your own tokens, streets, Chance cards and Community Chest cards. This is a good game to play with your family and friends. I played with my mom, dad and younger brother and we had a good time. It's fun to move around the board, buy your own house and collect money every time you pass Go. Also, the game can go on for a long time which is great because that just means you get to spend more time with your family and friends.
Ages 10 and older
Rating 5 -- Omar Brisbane, Hempstead
J Animals
J Animals
I tried out the J Animals Wearable Stuffed Animal Pajamas. they are really for kids a little younger than me, but they are cute! You can get a dog, cat, unicorn, zebra, or giraffe. when you are not wearing them, the roll up into a stuffed animal, but you might not want to take them off because they are so cozy.
Ages 5 and older
John Deere Monster Treads
John Deere Monster Treads (ERTL / Tomy)
John Deere Monster Treads is a remote controlled truck that can do tricks. One of the tricks it can do is a wheelie. Another trick it can do is a spinning wheelie. You do a spinning wheelie by going backwards and then forward quickly and it will do the spinning wheelie. Monster Treads can go over almost anything and drive on almost any terrain. It has lights and makes sounds too.
This is a really cool vehicle that is a lot of fun to play with. I just wish that it had a rechargeable battery pack instead of using the 6 AA batteries and one 9 volt needed to work. It's only a one player toy, but my brother and I took turns playing with it.
Ages 6 and older
Rating 4.5 -- Alex Ksiazek, West Islip
Crayola Wide Screen Light Design
Crayola Wide Screen Light Design Widescreen Light Designer
This toy reminds me of a large iPad. When you draw on it and then turn off the lights, the drawing glows in the dark! It looks so cool! I love the awesome colors and different pictures you can draw. This is a fun toy to play with in the dark. It worked really well and if you are creative and like drawing, you will enjoy this toy.
Ages 8 and older
Rating 5, Gersenda Gomez, Central Islip
Simon Swipe
Simon Swipe (Hasbro Gaming)
The Simon Swipe game is like the game Simon Says right at your fingertips. This game has 16 different playing levels, and four different game modes. You play the game by looking at which colors light up and touching the colors in order. You have to have a great memory to win this game. I really like this toy because it keeps you on your feet as you are challenged to get the order right. It makes cool sounds, too. If you get this toy you won't be disappointed.
Ages 6 and older
Rating 5 -- Kayla Benjamin, Hempstead
Nabi Dream Tab
Nabi Dream Tab
We played with the Nabi Dream Tab. It's an awesome new tablet. You can play games like Fruit Ninja, Ripe Tide GP2, Bag it and Rescue Roby. You can watch movies and TV channels too. You can listen to music as well. On the camera you can take videos and pictures and make them permanent. You can also read books like "Rapunzel" and "The Jungle Book." You can also play learning games like Math Ops and My ABC's. You can also do puzzles. If you are ages between 2-11 you will love it. If your parents don't want you on there too long they can set how long you play.
Ages 2-11
Rating 5 -- Kayla Ryder and Joshua Wildermuth, West Babylon
Wacky Lab
Wacky Lab (EduScience)
This new toy is for kids who like science and fun experiments. It has more than 100 tests and activities to try out. It will also help you on your biology, physics, electricity, and chemistry skills. Some of the activities include making snow at any time of the year, colorful coconut gravity goo, growing your own jelly crystals, and creating real quick sand. You can amaze your friends with exciting and cool experiments. The Wacky Lab is fun and educational. I had an awesome time playing with it. When I started trying experiments, I couldn't stop. This is one of the best toys I have ever experienced.
Ages 8 and older -- Amanda Cacioppo, West Babylon
'Frozen' Nabi Karaoke Box Bundle
'Frozen' Nabi Karaoke Box Bundle
I had so much fun with "Frozen" Nabi Karaoke Box Bundle. If you get the Karaoke Box you can also get the "Frozen" Karaoke App. This app has 9 great songs from the movie. If you want to sing to your own songs you can use Bluetooth or you can plug your device in. If you buy The Karaoke Box you will receive a free Karaoke Wrap. It is a sticker that you can put on your Karaoke Box to transform it into the perfect Frozen Karaoke. The best part is that it peels off with no residue. It has a high quality speaker and microphone so everyone can hear you. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.
Ages 8 and older
Rating 5 -- Ashley Scarlata, West Babylon
Disney Mickey Kettle Popcorn Popper
Disney Mickey Kettle Style Popcorn Popper (Disney)
This popcorn maker is amazing. The color scheme of the popcorn maker is black, red and white. The company made it look like Mickey Mouse which was really cool. It comes with a booklet. It requires electricity. It also brings four big Mickey Mouse cups and two spoons. At one time it can make six to eight cups of kettle style popcorn. In my opinion, it was a good product. Although it did not pop all the kernels, I still loved it.
Ages 7 and older
Rating 5 -- Nancy Rodriguez, Hempstead
City Action
City Action (PlayMobil)
The set I checked out was Playmobil City Action Set 呦: Large Crane. This toy is a very big toy. It is 30 inches high and has 32 pieces. You can move this toy up, down, left, right, and around. This toy comes with a character. Also, this toy requires batteries.
I would rate this toy four out of five because it takes a lot of effort to build. Just try to manuver the crane to pick up stuff, it takes skill! In my opinion I think this toy is good for 6-plus mainly because you need adult supervision. I think this toy is a great toy because at first I thought, "It's going to be one of those cranes you move without a remote," but I was wrong!
Ages 6 and older
Rating 4 -- Kiana Smith, Hempstead
Wii games Sports Club
Wii U Sports Club (Nintendo)
You can play this by yourself or with three other players. This game is fun and it gets your body moving, so it's great exercise. In the game you can do training to help you get better in the different games or you can lay the games. The games you can play are tennis, baseball, boxing, golf and bowling.
I love sports and I love video games, so if you love those things and if you have Wii U, WiiU sports club is perfect. When you play golf on this game it is better than the old one because you use the game pad. The game pad is better for golf because you look down and you see the golf ball and then you swing. One game that is bad is boxing. It just didn't seem as much fun. The other games are great though.
Ages 5 and older
Rating 4 -- Lola-Anne Konopa, West Babylon
Gravity Maze
Gravity Maze (Think Fun )
Gravity Maze is a game created by Think Fun. This game requires only one player, so I would take turns if another person wanted to play. Inside there is a gray pad, 9 different size and color cubes with a red target, instructions, 3 playing marbles and 60 to do cards with the maze. The maze is not finished but you have to finish it. There are 4 stages; beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert. This game makes you think very hard but if you get stumped so badly there is always a solution side, but I wouldn't give up and flip to the back. Also this game requires time and you have to be patient. If you are not patient this is not a good game for you. For each mode there are about 15 cards. The object of the game is to get the ball into the red target cube, if you do, you WIN, but if you cheat, you don't. In conclusion this game is very fun but difficult. Also, this game is very easy to clean up.
Ages 8+
Rating 4 -- Samantha Buonadonna, West Babylon


text:
Godzilla has never taken on an enemy quite like this. Instead of stomping his way through the streets of Tokyo or battling Mothra or King Ghidorah, this Godzilla is attacking the luminous world of the late painter Thomas Kinkade.
Artist Ron Lemen painted this masterpiece a few years ago, when Kinkade was still alive and painting. And yes, it is a commentary on Kinkade's artwork:
My idea was changing the landscape of art, wiping away the old habits and bringing in something new. Actually, I took an old and wiped it away, the landscape filled with happy little cottages and such...and such ick...our world is oversaturated with this stuff, can we change that please?
Technically, Godzilla is older than Kinkade's artwork (and, in fact, older than Kinkade himself), but Lemen's comment seems to be less a strict matter of old vs. new and more a matter of traditional fine arts vs. modern popular arts. Or perhaps, he's using Godzilla simply as a vehicle to erase Kinkade's landscapes, only to have Godzilla be defeated by another pop art monster down the line.
Godzilla vs. Kincade [sic] [Ron Lemen via Xombie Dirge]