Financial Industry Floats Open-Source Messaging Standard for Web Services, SOA

Financial Industry Floats Open-Source Messaging Standard for Web Services, SOA

This is an interesting idea. Cross platform support with no adapters necessary for messaging? This could be a potential benefit to smaller companies that cannot afford the initial investments in the bigger players. Open-Source continues to gain a lot of steam.

Top Ten Reasons to Batch

10. When your data absolutely has to be there a month after it happen
9. Watching a cascading implosion of dependent batch jobs at 2AM is kind of fun
8. War room sounds neat
7. Your afternoon naps are important
6. You need 24 hours to ponder a broken batch job
5. Real Time, You don't need no stinking real time
4. Month end data surprises are fun
3. You haven't learned anything in 20 years, why start now?
2. You like the client calling you every hour for 24 hours after a broke down batch
1. Cool batcharena song

Software Development in Large Companies

I have been thinking a lot about this topic as of late. The nature of my job, Integration Architecture, exposes me to a lot of projects within the company. Our development organizations are aligned to our business teams. The developments teams do not tend to do a lot of full blown custom development. Instead they are generally charged with implementing what I would call niche packaged applications from industry specific vendors. Implementations meaning getting the package to production with some custom add-ons like reporting, additional business logic or integration to other corporate systems.

Within each development team, the developer's skill sets may be mixed or all of one particular type of skill. This as you can imagine leads to the inconsistent application of technology across the company. Sometimes the choice of technology is driven by the package or often by the skill set of the particular application development team.

We have had much success with webMethods at our company. But I would argue it had less to do with the technology and more to do with how we have organized around it. We still see the same business aligned development teams, but we also implemented a small integration competency center. This competency center has been charged with overall responsibility of the architecture, implementation, and on-going support of the integration platform. This concentration of skill set has lead to consistent, reliable and repeatable integrations.

I'm curious to know what others see in their organizations. Should developers in large organizations be business aligned or do competency centers make more sense?

Yahoo! News - The Open-Source Challenge

Yahoo! News - The Open-Source Challenge

Right or wrong, Open-Source is rapidly changing the landscape. I think the term re-inventing themselves is going to come into play a lot over the next few years as the traditional software vendors try and figure this out.

ISS X-Force Database:sdk-jre-applet-restriction-bypass(18188): Sun SDK and JRE applet bypass sandbox restrictions

ISS X-Force Database:sdk-jre-applet-restriction-bypass(18188): Sun SDK and JRE applet bypass sandbox restrictions

For you webMethods folks, this shouldn't affect your servers...but your developer's desktops might have this problem if they are using the Sun JDK. Take note in the advice that it is not enough to just stop using it, it must be completely removed from the system.

New Web Services Standards

W3C and OASIS have put out some new recommendations on standards for Web Services. I don't know about you but I'm still trying to get my hands around the existing standards. One of the biggest challenges we have seen is interoperability between vendors. We are using a variety of vendors including Microsoft(.Net), webMethods, webSphere, custom C clients, custom Java clients plus others. All of which seem to have varying levels of support for Web Services.

One of the bright spots is the ease of which webMethods and .Net interoperate. Of course this is assuming you get over the hump of how webMethods works with doc/literal. Many thanks to Mark Carlson for that bit of knowledge.

I haven't found the interoperability between webSphere and anything to be as straight forward. I believe that is mainly due to the way the WSAD IDE does things for you behind the scenes. I admit I'm not an expert with the WSAD but I do fine that it generates code behind the scenes that uses IBM specific classes or implementations that does not always play well with others.

Java and Web Services

I am looking at different IDE's that have web services support(for Java development). I haven't been thrilled at the toolsets so far. It seems Microsoft has a better knack for the development environment. The Java tools are either really big and bulky ie WebSphere (WSAD ) or really light on features. .Net makes consuming and producing Web Services pretty trivial. I kind of like Sun's new Java Studio Creator. It takes a similar approach in terms of layout that Microsoft does. Web Services creation and consumption are almost identical to Microsoft's .Net environment. I wonder it there was any collaboration there.

I'm still trying to get use to Eclipse. I'm not a huge fan but that is the way of the future. webMethods is porting its development environment to Eclipse sometime in the fall. So I have little choice.

Techworld.com - Enterprise benefits of the Linux 2.6 kernel

Techworld.com - Enterprise benefits of the Linux 2.6 kernel

I thought this was an interesting article on some kernel differences between the major vendors. It is a little old but still applies. Does this contribute to vendor lock-in? Just how difficult would it be to move off of Redhat Enterprise and go to SuSe enterprise? I am talking about large scale enterprise applications.

LinuxPlanet - Reviews - SUSE Linux 9.2: Let the Branding Begin! - Installing SUSE 9.2

LinuxPlanet - Reviews - SUSE Linux 9.2: Let the Branding Begin! - Installing SUSE 9.2

I especially like the "Sacrificing a chicken" part.

Do not rule out lower-priced Apple iMac: analyst - Dec. 31, 2004

Do not rule out lower-priced Apple iMac: analyst - Dec. 31, 2004

I wonder if apple can ever gain a larger market share. Will they become a major player in the OS wars or is it just going to be Linux and Microsoft standing at the end. It seems like the new Macs with their BSD based OS and their very good GUI is combining the best of both worlds.