Adding Value to Message-based SOAs with Workflow (ARC307) Date: 9 November 2006 Start: 09:00 Finish: 10:15 In large-scale, loosely-coupled distributed systems, services communicate with each other using asynchronous messaging patterns. However, this event-based publish/subscribe communication is often incapable of expressing high-value, cross...

I've started blogging for IT Toolbox recently and am very happy to join their network. The blog is called Distributed Systems Simplified and will be focusing, you guessed it, on the architecture, design, and development of large-scale distributed systems. Here's the tag line: "The first law of distributed systems development is "Don't". But...

Via the "What to Fix" blog, Signs you have too much process. I totally connected with the last bullet: "You've reached CMMI level 7, in which you document reasons for the project failing before the kickoff" I think that those are called Risk Lists.

Well, only if you do it wrong. From the Sound Advice entry: "Services should be objects with lots of methods and represent effectively a whole application." Umm, no. Consider a more "document-centric" approach. The only kind of object I could consider comparing a service to would be the Active Object Pattern, and that falls horribly short. "SOA...

Get it here. Udi answers questions about implementing ESB capabilities on top of Microsoft's message queuing technology MSMQ, as well as dispels some myths around viewing services as the interface to business processes. Finally, he ties it all up with a critique on using object oriented analysis for BPM. Resources 1. Article on Microsoft's...

On the "Disciple and Punish" blog, I ran into an interesting entry: Revisiting the Battle of Abstractions". For starters, I really like the rising acceptance I see of messaging in SOA. Not only at the transport level, messaging as a top-level communication paradigm is (finally) getting traction. What interests me, though, is that...

Arnon gave a nice writeup of one of the sessions at our recent meeting. The whole SOA thing came up again, but this time in the context of databases; so called Service Oriented Data Architectures (SODA). One of the points made in favour of SODA rested upon a thesis Jim Gray wrote a while ago entitled "Queues are databases". Anyway, I won't...

Thomas Wagner gave me some apparently undue props around my recent post "DDD - why bother?". If I wasn't clear about the bottom line around DDD, here it is again: "if you are the one tasked with building the right system, you just won���t be able to do it unless you build the system right ��� DDD won���t be a bother, but a necessity." I read...

I've been getting some emails and calls asking me what I think about Rocky's recent post Semantic coupling: the elephant in the SOA room. There have already been some comments on Rocky's site, not to mention Philip Nelson's post. What I want to address here is at two levels. The first is the feeling of frustration about what's going on in the...

Get it here. In this podcast we address non-functional requirements in SOA, such as throughput and latency. We'll discusses a whitepaper on the topic, as well as the use of pipeline architecture within a service to comply with SLA's that define these non-functional requirements. (MP3) Resources 1. Whitepaper on Using Intelligent Parallel...

Taken from Ron Jacobs (of ArCast fame) "Patterns and Anti-Patterns for Service-Oriented Architectures": 3 Hype Busting Truths: 1. Tight coupling has its place 2. Prefer explicit behavior over implicit 3. Services are the interface to business processes The successes that I've seen on projects were those where business processes were designed...

This came up on my radar, its from the WebSphere Power Magazine. "Although technologists have been calling for the marriage of hot technologies such as SOAs and AJAX to help users better leverage Web services, the industry is only now beginning to see products that fully support this integration. At the AJAXWorld conference, JackBe and TIBCO...

Jesse quickly rebutted my claims on the value of WPF. We don't seem to be disagreeing so much as coming from different domains: "If you, being a developer, do all of your design work and your UI code is really just 5% of your apps, then WPF probably isn't going to do you much good, because you obviously don't care enough about your UI anyway...

Arnon wonders "what were you thinking?". I also wrote this up on the Web Services blog on Dr. Dobb's. It's no wonder, really. Me and Arnon see things quite similarly - you should see us when we're both part of the architectural review team on a project. Picture something like this: That's right, Arnon is Waldorf, and I'm Statler.

Jesse seems to be swallowing the Microsoft party line without missing a drop in his latest post Screw 2.0, I'm Going Straight to 3.0. From his post: "The 2.0 framework doesn't really give you a massive amount of really new really cool features. There is one-click, which we probably wouldn't use anyway, generics (which are useful as a time...