Kyle Gabhart

A Journey of False Starts This is not the first time you’ve had your heart set on revolutionizing your information systems: One year, you rolled out a big Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) initiative, but it was too brittle and carried high maintenance costs. For a while you experimented with Web Services, but found that while they were easy to work with, they were largely insufficient to meet your broader needs due to a lack of architectural design guidelines. Out-sourcing, in-sourcing, up-sourcing, down-sourcing, and cross-sourcing just seemed to shuffle the work around and tended to result in the blame-game. You’ve bought every pill and tonic you could find (ESBs, network appliances, UDDI registries, load balancers, etc.), each with varying degrees of success. One crazy weekend you deployed a full-scale dynamic rules engine to fully automate decision log... (more)

SOA Governance: Start Small and Build Incrementally

If governance were a house, you would be left with the options of either building it from the ground-up or attempting to haul a complete house in on a large truck. While the latter is possible, it is fraught with difficulty. The house does not lend itself well to transport. It may become damaged during the move. It may not fit on your lot or connect smoothly to your utilities, requiring modifications to be made on the spot. The former option, building the entire house on site, certainly has its challenges (proper design, accurate implementation, quality assurance), but the risks ... (more)

Book Excerpt: Enabling Agile Business with SOA

This content is excerpted from Service Oriented Architecture Field Guide for Executives (978-0-470-26091-3) with permission from the publisher, John Wiley & Sons. You may not make any other use, or authorize any others to make any other use of this excerpt, in any print or non-print format, including electronic or multimedia. SOA Value Story Ronald Schmelzer, of industry think tank ZapThink, describes four key benefits to SOA.[1] Reducing integration expenses (both development costs and maintenance costs) Increasing asset reuse (no need to re-invent the wheel each time) Increasin... (more)

Wireless Web Serviceswith J2ME Part IISOAP or XML-RPC? The answer depends on your needs

Last month in Part I (WSJ Vol. 2 Issue 1) we discussed J2ME and accessing Web services from wireless devices using the XML-RPC protocol. In this article, we will consider SOAP as a vehicle for accessing Web services from wireless devices, comparing and contrast-ing it with XML-RPC. Our sample application will again be a J2ME midlet, however, we will use EnhydraME's kSOAP rather than kXML-RPC to provide the protocol's implementation. Overview of SOAP The Simple Object Access Protocol is, according to the 1.1 specification, "a lightweight protocol for exchange of information in a de... (more)

The Hype About .NET

You've heard the hype about .NET. You've read a couple of vague articles about dynamic discovery and invocation, service-oriented architecture, and how SOAP and a handful of other XML standards are forever changing the software industry. These ideas have intrigued you and you're interested in learning more - or at the very least, you recognize the importance of being able to add these acronyms to your resumé. In either case, you want to explore the world of .NET, but are unable or unwilling to fork over a thousand bucks for Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET product. This article is ... (more)