[wging]

It’s interesting to think about how much of a perspective shift this must have been, especially the service oriented bits. Interestingly, I think it might not have even been made completely in the authors’ minds at the time of this proposal. (Which is understandable, of course. It’s a proposal, not a retrospective on already accepted ideas.)

For example,

> In the case of DC processing, customer service and other functions need to be able to determine where a customer order or shipment is in the pipeline. The mechanism that we propose using is one where certain nodes along the workflow insert a row into some centralized database instance to indicate the current state of the workflow element being processed.

definitely doesn’t seem to reflect the hiding of a database behind an interface. (From a workflow node’s perspective, rows in that centralized database should be an implementation detail it has no knowledge of.)

Then again, this is part of their pitch for workflow processing, not service-oriented architecture.

[ajkjk]

Anecdotally, it was at least 2015 before the DC processing system was actually mostly operating against service-oriented interfaces (when I left in 2016 we had a few old tools left that still talked to the databases directly :/ ).