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)
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)
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)
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)
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)