Experts: 'Indiana Jones' pure fiction - CNN.com

Experts: 'Indiana Jones' pure fiction - CNN.com Okay everyone have the collective... duh. What would we do without experts. Well we apparently can't take a whip and pistol while raiding archaeological digs and shoot wrath of God beams out of the Arc of the Covenant.

Reminds me of some of the SOA experts telling us that it's about the business over and over again, duh..

Mainframe versus the cloud

An interesting interview with an IBM guy on the role of the mainframe in business and the latest buzz on cloud computing. He has a lot of good points and most importantly his points are based in reality and not academic discussions. To summarize, the mainframe is still the key system in a lot of companies, this is especially true in financial companies (I can attest to that). The idea that these companies would move these systems off the mainframe and into some cloud of services located anywhere and hosted by anyone is completely ridiculous. That will be about the same adoption rate as companies moving to a successful SOA. :)

Some of his points are also not valid as well. Running programs in complete isolation is certainly possible on the mainframe but only if you have architected and setup it up that way. I've seen regions bring down regions because of some shared piece of hardware or pipes. As with anything the touted benefits are available if you actually know what you are doing.

I ultimately believe the mainframe will die a slow death as a couple of generations start leaving the workplace. The lack of skilled resources in that field has already started to have an impact. That being said it's replacement will probably not be the cloud. In the meantime it's alive and kicking so brush up on your green screen.

Woah on WOA

Web Oriented Architecture is becoming the new academic discussion from the industry analysts. I feel like I was watching a TV show and someone changed the channel right when the good part was starting. What happened to SOA? We got it all figured out and time to move on to an implementation specific architecture? Just when we start to get the point driven in that services are not about the technology here comes WOA which is very much about the technology.

I don't really think WOA should be used in the same context as SOA. It's not the same thing or even related in my opinion. Using it in the same discussion context as SOA just confuses more an already confused bunch of IT people let alone the business. It may have it's place in the architecture tool box but it's only one tool.

Here is the thing I like about services. It doesn't matter what the underlying implementation is, where it is implemented, or how the services are wired together. It doesn't matter if they are on the external web, internal web, outsourced, Rest style, web service style etc etc etc. It just doesn't matter. If we implement those services a certain way and with a certain set of technologies, do we need another label for it? Does it really provide a value to have another label? I say nope.

What do you think? Is this more analyst mumbo jumbo or does WOA as a term and architecture actually provide value?

Spider Plague Closes Australian Hospital :: WRAL.com

Spider Plague Closes Australian Hospital :: WRAL.com. Seems like something out of one of those B horror movies. Of course I did notice in the article that warm weather was to blame....which means this will end up being attributed to Global Warming. Just think, spiders will take over the earth in the next 50 years because we drive to much. Who would have ever made that link? Personally I'd rather go via a redback spider than drown in the rising sea. Of course this brings up another point, going green. If we go green and it actually reduces the earth's temperature, what impact will that have on the redback spiders? I'm sure the redbacks don't have an advocacy group yet but just wait.

It's the data

I'm stating the obvious here but the underlying key element to services is the data. Agility, reuse, composibility and all that other jazz is difficult to achieve when you do not really understand the data. Chris Madrid has posted an article on Master Data Management over at SOA Magazine. I think Chris's points on the issues facing the enterprise are outlined very well. Multiple sources of the same or variations of the same data are the heart of the issue. Keeping them in sync and knowing which one to draw from can be difficult at best. The solution as outlined by Chris, is basically a central repository that serves as the master data. A very noble cause within the enterprise.

I think there are a few issues with this that some enterprises will run into. Does the enterprise actually have data architects? I going to throw out there that surprisingly few do. That can be a problem. Developers, DBA's and even Enterprise Architects don't always make for the best data architects. And even when they do understand it very well, it's usually not their primary focus. Moving to the Master Data Management concept requires resources that are focused on just that. This leads to the next issue which is buy in. Can you get the enterprise to agree on the concept and if so can you then get them to agree on the data model?

I don't think the issues facing Master Data Management are all that different from the concepts of a Common Information Model. It can be a large black hole for an enterprise. Attempting something like that a can turn into a long effort that ultimately doesn't keep pace with the changing business and is outdated before it's even put into place. I do agree with the concept though and I think the closer you can get to this state the more successful your SOA can be.

Red Hat bails on consumer Linux desktop | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Red Hat bails on consumer Linux desktop | Tech news blog - CNET News.com. I won't say I told you so but I told you so. That market is just to tough to crack without throwing tons of resources at it. Apple has that ability, Linux does not.

First PC? Or was it a MAC?

It was 20 years ago today: Not Sgt. Pepper, but my PCjr | Coop's Corner : A Blog from Charlie Cooper - CNET News.com Charlie Cooper posted this entry on his first PC. It started me reminiscing about the old days. I had a Timex Sinclair ZX81. It was hooked up to a cassette recorder and a small portable TV. My first BASIC programs solved quadratic equations and graphed Sine waves. I thought that was very cool. My neighbor on the other hand, who was a year younger than me, had a TRS-80. He wrote a BASIC problem to automate his father's drug store. Just slightly different skill levels. :)

Practical Service Design

One thing I've noticed over the last year is the continued lack of resources on detailed service design. There are plenty of resources geared at the architecture layer but very few geared toward the person actually doing the coding. I am hoping over the new few months to share some of my practical experience and pose some questions I still ponder on the details of service design. I'll also share some links on the Web that I have found to be useful.

If you do the actual design and implementation of services, please feel free to chime in with your own experiences. There is no one right way to do it. Good dialog on practices is always beneficial.

I'm in the middle of some major projects at work so I'm not sure when I'll get started. I want the content to be detailed and useful so it could take some time. In the meantime I'm very excited about the new book coming from Thomas Erl on Web Service Contract Design.

Linux PCs?

Here is a story over on yahoo about the emerging Linux PC. I'm a big fan of Linux and Open Source software in general. However Linux on the average consumer's(that includes business users) desktop is just not going to happen other than in the niche its already in. The only vendor that has made any dent (small dent) in Microsoft's PC OS realm is Apple. You can make arguments all day long about the differences in the technology but it makes little to no difference.

It would be like your favorite local brew pub going against Anheuser-Busch. Of course I will look back on this in 10 years to see if I just completely missed the boat but somehow I don't think so.

Common Information Model

The idea of a Common Information Model to rule all within a business has been around for a long time. It's gained a lot more traction recently with SOA. Here is a post from Nick Malick at Microsoft and some of their efforts. His post is part of an ongoing conversation with Alex Maclinovsky at Sun.

They both bring up good points but I find myself leaning towards Alex's realism a bit more. I can bring up the point that the average business IT shop does not have a lot of luxuries when it comes to time. CIM's take time... a lot of time. They also take knowledgeable data architects, expert negotiators and the ability to bend the space time continuum. Simply out of reach to most IT shops.

Would a large model that rules all hold up to the daily demands of the constantly changing business? I know the academic arguments around versioning, governance etc but that within itself can be difficult even with a governance product. By the way Microsoft has a new product in this space, only for MS products though. :(

I've stated before that one size doesn't fit all meaning what works for my organization might not work for yours. I have found that smaller simplistic data structures combined with more granular services can achieve a lot of flexibility and reuse. These can be wired together to make more coarse grained services but the reuse tends to go down and the complexity goes up.

Ultimately data translation and manipulation has to happen anyway to satisfy the needs of the off the shelve systems as well as old legacy systems. Some common simplistic data structures can help with that without having to go for the big bang approach that a CIM can create.

Upgrade Time

My home server is in need of an upgrade/replacement. Here is a picture of it (Notice the cool steering wheel). I think my mobile phone has more RAM than it.

Home PC

It's served me well for the 100+ years its been around but I'm thinking time for a upgrade plus I'm getting tired of the black smoke coming out of it. Don't get me wrong the three laptops in the house have more than enough computing power for my everyday use. But the keeper of the blog needs a little more juice. Plus the OS it's running on needs a little upgrading as well.

I haven't decided what its new platform and OS will be, I'll have to do a little pondering on that. SUSE has served me well but I might want to shake it up a bit just for the grins of it. I'll keep you posted on my pondering.

How's SOA?

This seems like a strange question since most field IT folks (not analysts) are still not really sure what SOA is or how to implement it. Is a year really long enough to give organizations time enough to get their stuff together? How many IT shops have the luxury of stopping time and focusing on changing the way they build applications? Isn't SOA really an iterative journey over a longer period of time? Todd Biske wrote a very good post on Setting SOA Expectations.

Todd was inspired by this post from Anne Thomas Manes who was looking for SOA success stories. Although Anne painted a pretty bleak picture I not sure enough time has past to call it a day and move on to the next set of buzz words. This quote from Anne in particular got me thinking:

This company reorganized IT around functional capabilities (rather than business units) and established strong positive and negative incentives that encourage people to adopt a better attitude toward sharing. I'm beginning to think that this is the only path to SOA success.

I not sure I would go along with this train of thought. The dynamics of a company, the personnel in the IT shop, the business landscape the company plays in, the size of the company are all factors that shape the way an IT shop functions. There is no one size fits all. What works for one organization is probably not going to work for another. Still I think there is potential value to be had on the road to an SOA style of architecture and the sharing of best practices. That doesn't mean all best practices will work for us or are required for us to derive value.

Okay my next post will be back to more technical in nature(XML Schema). I know you can hardly wait, XML Schema discussions make for such fun dinner conversation.

It's Back

It's been a year since I shut down the blog. I'm finally starting to settle in at my new company so I thought it would be a good time to get going again with the blog. I can't believe a year has gone by so fast.

The IT shop is much smaller than my previous one but the intensity is much higher. I was brought in to jump start the webMethods practice and that's what we have done over the past year. I've spent most that time developing rather than architecting and it's been a blast. There is just something about being hands on that just can't be beat.

In addition to webMethods, I'm really focused on Web Services right now and in particular XML Schema design. Stay tuned for more on that.

Shutting down the blog

It's been fun.

Mark

Follow-up to SOA Master Class

I've gone through their hands on lab of the X-Registry. First impressions, very extensive and very easy to use. It had a flawless install and no issues running through the on-line labs. It is worth checking out.

While I was on their site, this popped up -

CISCO Buys Reactivity for $135M
SOA Master Class - Wednesday, 21 February 2007

© SOA Master Class

Consolidation continues in the SOA market space.

webMethods Launches Free Trial Download of Industry-Leading SOA Governance Solution @ SOA WORLD MAGAZINE

A very nice move by webMethods. I highly recommend going over to http://www.soamasterclass.com and checking this out. You are not going to get very many opportunities like this with SOA governance products.

UDDI Part 2

In my previous post I talked about working with MS's UDDI server. The Burton report that was released goes into a lot of detail about the big players in the Web Services management space like Systinet (Now owned by HP) and Infravio (Now owned by webMethods). The report really trashes MS's UDDI offering. I can certainly understand that, there is not much to it other than it's free with Windows Server 2003.

The bigger story however is the cost of the products mentioned above. They are expensive and thats all I going to say about that. So I'm curious now. How many folks are going out and buying these types of products versus building their own home grown solutions?

Windows Can Run Unmodified on SUSE in a Xen Environment @ SOA WORLD MAGAZINE

Virtualization continues to heat up. Speaking of heating up, the last part of the article is on Servers & Global Warming. I wonder how long it will take Sun to latch on to this report.

UDDI set to emerge from the shadows of obscurity | Service-Oriented Architecture | ZDNet.com

Finally some talk about UDDI. This has been a very quiet topic for a while. I wonder if folks have been so busy selling their org's on Web Services that they are now turning their attention to managing them. At any rate there are not a lot of stand alone UDDI providers out there. Most come as part of a larger Web Services management suite.

I have been working with the UDDI provider built-in to Windows Server 2003. It is pretty basic and of course Microsoft changed the nomenclature of the standard UDDI pieces. But in the end it does work and I have even managed to get the UDDI client built-in to the webMethods Integration Server to talk to it.

JAX-WS 2.1 RI is released!

Good stuff. Much better than the old days.

Linux Desktop

I've tried out several flavors of Linux for use as a desktop system. I have to say Ubuntu wins for me. It's just way to easy and very fast. The cool thing is using it with Parallels. You can try Ubuntu out using their LiveCD option which means you don't even have to install it. I've used Fedora 5 & 6 as well as SuSe 9 and 10.2 as well. They are good distributions as well. It's hard to beat the Ubuntu though.

Enterprise Java Community: Mule: A Case Study

A very good article/case study on the use of Mule. Having used it a little, I can say that the ease of use is there for most things. Serious transformation does get more tedious however when compared to your normal EAI platforms like webMethods.

Overall a good product and a way to get your feet wet without spending a lot of money.

webMethods Includes AJAX-Based UI in Fabric 7.0 Release @ SOA WEB SERVICES JOURNAL

More good stuff from webMethods. The new BPM tool is pretty slick from the demos I have seen.

SOA Mistakes

This is a follow-up to my previous post on JBOWS. It seems some others are touting the role of the ESB as well. Learning from SOA Mistakes and Avoid SOA Pitfalls both go into some detail about the role of the ESB. The main point both make is it helps you avoid JBOWS and the same old brittle architecture of the past.

The bottom line is this, implementing a bunch of Web Services without something in the middle is going to leave you with a standards oriented mess. Let's call that SOM. Pronounce it like some, as in that is SOM fine architecture you can up with.

Web Services Specs.

A good article that is not vendor bias. The second page has some very good resources for compliance testing and user group resources.