Last week Joe McKendrick from ZDNet asked the question are SOA anti-principles more important than success principles? The idea of anti-principles came from Steve Jones, who a few years back did some nice work documenting SOA anti-patterns. In a post published last fall, Steve builds o...

Lately there has been a lot of buzz around HTML5 Web Sockets, which defines a full-duplex communication channel that operates through a single socket over the Web. HTML5 Web Sockets is not just another incremental enhancement to conventional HTTP communications; it represents a colossa...

Logicworks is a provider of highly reliable cloud hosting solutions. The company offers its clients managed cloud services with high service levels in the areas of high availability and increased transaction throughput. Logicworks’ cloud data center infrastructure is required to deliv...

I had a great conversation with a well-respected colleague of mine today. We discussed what it will take to deliver on the promise of hybrid clouds. We both agreed that a significant amount of intelligence needs to be added to the current architecture of Cloud Computing in order to eve...

Market conditions are in a constant state of flux. The economy is, well, the economy. The regulatory environment shifts based on the latest business scandal and which political party holds sway. Plus, there is always a new management strategy to solve world hunger or something. As user...

This article looks at the basic interoperability requirements when communicating with the Cloud, and in particular at techniques and standards used to express and enforce wire-level contracts between communicating parties, as these parties are increasingly also contracting parties in a...

These days XML Gateways are a core infrastructure component of any enterprise SOA deployment. XML Gateways provide the ability to integrate services securely with granular access control, data-level encryption, integrity through signatures and XML threat mitigation. XML Gateways can be...

It is very rare today to find a business application that has not exposed its interface via SOAP/XML. XML is the building block that enables business or consumer applications to exchange data in a standard structured format. The exchange of XML data typically takes place through an SOA...

Most enterprise technologists should see a continued payoff of the hard work in planning, architecture, documentation, development and configuration work that has been occurring over the last several years.  Enterprise technologists were building Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) lo...

According to a Smart Enterprise Magazine CIO report, three-quarters of today's CIOs help their companies develop new products or services. Gartner Group's 2008 Worldwide Survey of CIOs, 85 percent of CIOs are now looking toward "IT to make the difference in their enterprise strategy." ...

One of the main concerns among IT architects planning an implementation of an enterprise data virtualization layer in their service-oriented architecture (SOA) or overall information system is the performance of the participating data services. Performance becomes particularly importan...

Data is the lifeblood of any organization and, in the last decade, increasing emphasis has been placed on protecting that data so organizations can recover the information that they need in the time frame they need it. Replication is now rapidly emerging as a viable form of data protec...

Adopting an open source tool for SOA testing seems the simplest, most cost effective choice for developers and testers early on. However, you should plan and consider the implications of a longer term strategy with an open source testing tool. There are many aspects of service testing ...

If you’ve followed the arc of the SOA revolution, you might have expected the current moment to be one of great fanfare and proclamations of success. SOA (was supposed to have) arrived! SOA (was supposed to be) an accepted standard for software development and enterprise architecture. ...

Change, then change again: it’s a story familiar to developer managers everywhere. Projects are getting bigger and more complex. Developers are striving to reduce time-to-market, and squeeze releases out ever faster to keep pace with the market’s demands for new functionality. W...

Modern inter-networked software architecture created for today’s “on-demand” business needs have fundamentally increased the susceptibility of applications and, more important, data to security-related attacks and compromises. The rapidly changing environment: increased data breach/los...

Today, every IT enablement and business transformation task has an element of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) embedded in it. However, even with matured SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) processes for IT execution, the gap in identifying business services for an SOA implementat...

BPEL is a mystery to me. EbXML? Sorry, not a clue. These things, of course, are about defining and executing business rules and processes in enterprise application servers. On my travels through the world of PowerBuilder applications I’ve frequently come across the need for business ru...

It’s Thursday morning, you’re the CEO of a large, publicly traded company, and you just called your executives into the conference room for the exciting news. The board of directors has approved the acquisition of a key competitor, and you’re looking for a call-to-action to get everyon...

Diffie makes a good point: taken as a whole, the benefits of commodity air travel are so high that it allows us to ignore the not insignificant negatives (I gripe as much as anyone when I travel, but this doesn’t stop me from using the service). In the long term, will the convenience o...

DaaS is the latest entrant into the “as a Service” realm and typically provides tools for defining logical data structures, data services like APIs and web service interfaces, customizable user interfaces, and data storage, backup, recovery and export policies. To ensure successful Daa...

"At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on Google sites all over the world," notes a Google spokesman in a recent statement on The Google Official Blog. "Right now, we are running a small experiment of a new Google homepage design that shows links when ...

The three perpetual business demands of better, faster and cheaper may just be three of the best reasons to consider infrastructure virtualization. Today’s virtualization technologies, properly architected and deployed, can provide significant benefit to organizations working to evolve...

WS-BPEL 2.0 is the dominant specification to standardize orchestration logic and process automation between Web services. The BPEL model is used to assemble a set of discrete, essentially disparate, services into an end-to-end process flow to transform the existing stateless and uncorr...

This article provides a step-by-step approach to cloning the DB2 Universal Database (DB2 UDB) across platforms and describes the usage of DB2 utilities that help to accomplish the task. There is no direct support in DB2 UDB for cross-platform backup and restore operations. It means one...

Distribution and communication between applications and services is a central concept in modern application architectures. In order to profit from distribution you have to keep some basic principles in mind – otherwise you can easily run into performance and scalability problems. Durin...

While there are many attempts to fix the badly broken IT architectures within our enterprises, most ‘solutions’ just put another technology layer on top of the existing technologies in hopes that the technology will somehow fix the issues. As you may have guessed, it just makes things ...

Mauritius may soon emerge as the next ecologically aware data center of choice for companies from the United States to Australia, due to its progressive approach to technological investment and overall national stability. Using an innovative Sea Water Air Conditioning (SWAC) system pum...

The RESTful architectural style [1], with its URL addressable, resource oriented approach allows you to define Web services which can have multiple runtime representation in a variety of different media types. You define a Web resource, encapsulating the desired functionality within a...

"Virtualizing hardware appliances is pretty tough, it's pretty much impossible," says Intel’s Blake Dournaee in this informative and forward-looking webinar currently screening on SYS-CON.TV. Co-presenting with Oracle’s Vikas Jain, the webinar discusses three game-changing innovations....

With heightened pressure on today’s businesses from the current global economic woes, figuring out what to do next on many business and technology decision-making levels, and making sure they are the right moves, can make or break your business. Take a moment to consider the following ...

Have you noticed how people that are neck deep in complexity almost always ask for a standardized solution? And they supposedly do this to regain oversight.

And in reverse; have you noticed how people that have everything neatly packed in small modular boxes almost always as...

The Gartner Hype cycle research shows Cloud Computing as being on the peak of expectations… the very top of the hype bubble roller coaster. Vendors are looking for something to sell, and the consolidation of the data center, reducing operational cost and economy of scale are as conv...

Justifying the extra investment for developing a single-purpose service – a service expected to solve only one large business problem - instead of putting the single-purpose logic inside a non-service-oriented application can be challenging. Reuse, the most popular motivation for creat...

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) that have previously considered virtualization in the cloud but decided that it is too expensive or simply not viable should think again. Virtualization and cloud computing enables SMBs to green their operations and build IT infrastructures that are a...

While there’s certainly no shortage of opinions on the future of SOA, the reality is that SOA is very much alive. The core principles of what SOA can do in terms of cost savings, increased productivity, and the virtual elimination of information and application silos won’t go away. How...

ESB products emerged around 2002 from message-oriented middleware (MOM). Faced with market domination by IBM, MOM vendors were the first to jumpstart the ESB concept with the aim of developing a unique selling proposition. They added Web service and EAI capabilities on top of existing ...

SOA C-level skeptics come in all shapes and sizes. They can be in any industry or any government agency. They can be close friends who “really like you” and no matter what, will invite you to their backyard barbeques. However, despite their differences or that fact that they may be you...

The "reset economy" has moved the business and operations maturity process of IT from "nice to have" to "must have," if costs are going to be cut without undermining operational integrity.

Businesses tend to focus their architecture on efficiency instead of agility. This clear distinction between optimising for the known versus optimising for the unknown inherently counteracts on businesses in their effort to seize any of the new opportunities that arises around them. T...