While working at MCI in 1995, I was exposed for the first time to the benefits of service orientation. I was responsible for the order entry application for 1-800-MUSIC-NOW (which turned out to be a marketing flop), in which call center agents needed to process credit card payments for music CDs. Fortunately for me, MCI was alread

[Read more...]

Prompted by a question from a business partner, I've added a section to our Frequently Asked Questions, addressing where XAware fits among other tools and technologies in the integration space. These are common questions that many wonder about, so I thought I'd post them here.  The full FAQ is located here: http://www.xaware.or

[Read more...]

A survey released this week from AmberPoint, titled "State of SOA Adoption Survey", shows steady growth in SOA adoption among respondents. While I always take a vendor-sponsored survey with a grain of salt, AmberPoint seems to have found their way to real SOA implementers in the corporate environment. Systems Integrators, vendors, and consultants were culled out of the distribution

[Read more...]

Enterprises have complex information structures as a result of evolving applications and databases deployed through the years. For these companies, SOA is a logical strategy to repurpose existing application functionality across the enterprise. Done properly, SOA also brings agility, the ability to rapidly adapt existing capabilities to new business process needs, without the traditional 6,

[Read more...]

Dana Blankenhorn at ZDNet talked today about how the open source ecosystem is a lot like the Pull-a-Part yards in the South and Midwest (see http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/). A Pull-a-Part is an auto junk yard that inventories its parts for easy identification and retrieval. I remember my first experience at a junk yard. My dad dragged me along in the hunt for a replacement radio for o

[Read more...]

When discussing XAware with technology users, I typically start by saying that XAware technology provides an XML-based data abstraction layer. This is a fairly simple idea with potentially powerful ramifications. Decomposing the phrase, we have "XML-based" and "data abstraction layer". Despite its drawbacks, XML has proven over the years to be a universal format for represen

[Read more...]

I see a growing trend to draw lessons on how to develop services from the basic design of the internet itself. The internet maximizes scalability and resilience into a platform proven as an engine for innovation. Doesn't it make sense to model SOA implementation on these same core principles? Ganesh Prasad states it simply (

[Read more...]

SpringSource recently announced a new project, Spring Integration. See The Server Side at http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=47868 for an active discussion and links to related resources.

Much of the discussion revolves around how the new project works with, or competes against other in

[Read more...]

In most XAware projects, the question arises of how to manage user names and passwords for the back end systems participating in a service. It turns out there are a number of ways to do this, all involving making the information available to the BizDriver which requires the information to establish the physical connection. The two primary alternatives are: access user name and password from a v

[Read more...]

There was a lot of talk about governance this week at Gartner's Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit in Las Vegas. What is SOA governance? Simply put, SOA governance defines the policies, procedures and rules of how an organization implements and manages its SOA. Just like we have a development process guiding how we develop core software (XAware uses Agile/Sc

[Read more...]