Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Pouring cold water on SOA 'reuse' mantra | Service-Oriented Architecture | ZDNet.com

An interesting article on reuse in the SOA world. I would add to the article by saying if you are successful with reuse of services another host of problems can crop up. Once a live running interface is in use by lots of folk, maintenance, upgrades, patching, outages, enhancements etc can become a real issue.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do it but you better have a good plan on how you are going to handle it.

Friday, August 25, 2006

Web Services Software Factory

Microsoft has just released a Web Services Software Factory. From what I have been able to digest so far it's not to bad especially from a getting started standpoint. I'm actually working on something similar for our webMethods Fabric layer. It follows a similar architecture but with a lot more messaging injected into it. It's a bit of a hybrid approach to EDA and SOA styles of architecture with messaging and web services as a foundation.

Obviously the Microsoft provided architecture could apply and be implemented with any other platforms that support web services. Microsoft does provide actual examples of the implementations with the download they provide. That means you are going to have to have VS 2005 in order to run the stuff. Yes I can hear the collective sigh.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Monday, August 21, 2006

Slashdot | DoD Study Urges OSS Adoption

A very good study/report on OSS that was presented to the DoD. Be sure to follow the links to get to the pdf. It's 79 pages long but a very good read. Vendor lock-in is a key theme.

webMethods acquires Cerebra

Here is the announcement Metadata is taking a front seat at webMethods.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Money Side of SOA

Todd Biske has started an interesting discussion on SOA Consulting. This was prompted in part by Brenda Michelson's announcement of a new business venture. Good luck to Brenda by the way.

Friday, August 11, 2006

Frustration

Integration architecture can be very frustrating some days. I'm having one of those weeks. Fortunately I'm off on vacation next week so I can clear what's left of the mind.

As most large organizations experience, we stay in an almost constant cycle of maintenance, upgrades and other vendor driven changes. Very little time is left for true innovation and adding real business value. Unfortunately explaining the way out to clients whose attitude consist of "git r done" is a very frustrating task. Anybody counting how many times I've used the word frustrating.

The scenario works basically like this. Hey client, if you spend a little more time up front, you can help isolate your application and others from changes down the road. Client says, hey integration architect dude I just need to "git r done". Fast forward a year later. Hey client, we have to upgrade that application because the vendor is dropping support for that version. Client says, but I wrote a hundred interfaces directly into that app, it's going to cost me a fortune to upgrade and it's going to be so disruptive. Client then says, oh by the way I've got another app to put by next week and I just need to "git r done".

The only sound at this point is the integration architect banging his/her head against the brick wall. I'm running out of Advil.

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Turning Service-Oriented Events into Business Insight @ SOA WEB SERVICES JOURNAL

Interesting article. webMethods has a product that does some of this. A few of their customers have used to some success. I wonder how much traction this will gain and will it become a true differentiator in the business space? Seems a lot of enterprises are still trying to grasp the model part and haven't made it to the measure part.