Integration Appliances
Integration appliances aim to make integration cheaper faster and more reliable. Is this technology ready for prime time?
View ArticleDoodleware
Many integration tools offer graphical development tools. Do they really make integration easier?
View ArticleHub and Spoke [or] Zen and the Art of Message Broker Maintenance
The Hub-and-Spoke concept manifests itself in many ways in integration solution. Like any popular concept, it can sometimes cause as much confusion as it provides help.
View ArticleWhat Makes a Good Integration Developer?
When we assess the quality of a software engineer we don't look as much how long he has worked with a specific language but rather whether he or she has a good grasp of the underlying models and...
View ArticleThe Dark Side of Encapsulation?
Encapsulation and abstraction are the holy grail of today's software development. One of the great successes of hiding the implementation details under a common, abstracted interface are TCP/IP stacks....
View ArticleHysteresis of Design Decisions
Design decisions can be influenced by many factors. In order to make matters more predictable, many architects look for clear-cut borderlines. How complex does my screen navigation have to be in order...
View ArticleNo Escape From Integration
I had never thought about having guest appearances on my ramblings, but this e-mail response from my friend Hyon made me laugh hard enough that I think it would be a waste not to share it with the...
View ArticleIntegration Styles
A number of integration books classify integration into styles such as database integration, functional integration and so on. However, on closer examination it turns out that there is a fair amount of...
View ArticleCorrelation and Conversations
When using asynchronous messaging, we can no longer rely on the linear, in-sequence execution of events. Therefore, the notion of correlating multiple messages is fundamental to designing robust...
View ArticleJavaOne Redux
For a change I spoke at a conference without traveling halfway around the world. At over 15,000 attendees, JavaOne is one of the largest developer conferences. Unfortunately, the signal-to-noise ratio...
View ArticleVisualizing Dependencies
Many of you have seen my rants on doodleware and top-down modeling. At the same time, anyone who has seen my book must believe me when I say that I am a very visual person. Is Gregor going...
View ArticleWeb Services Jeopardy
It is nearly impossible to keep track of all the Web Services (WS-*) specifications or proposed "standards". The matter is only worsened by the many competing proposals. Should you be using WS-Eventing...
View ArticleDependency Injection in Messaging Architectures
The notion of Dependency Injection or Inversion of Control has generated quite a bit of interest lately. To a large extend, the move towards this architectural style is driven by developer's...
View ArticleLook Ma -- No Middleware! Using Event-Driven Architectures inside a JVM.
Our most recent project was to replace a batch-oriented stored procedure with a more flexible, maintainable and scaleable Java-based architecture. We chose an event-driven architectural style that...
View ArticleIndigo Design Preview
I just attended the Indigo Strategic Design Review in Redmond. This means we got to interact with the product team and play with some pre-beta bits. Naturally, a lot of details are under NDA and are...
View ArticleAre "Pattern" and "Component" Antonyms?
Last year's OOPSLA tutorial on Enterprise Integration Patterns was quite well received. The most frequent constructive criticism was that the whole tutorial was PowerPoint as opposed to running code. I...
View ArticleACM Middleware Conference: Pub-Sub and Related Topics
I just attended the conference in Toronto (I thought a 1/2 day tutorial in integration patterns). This conference is more of an academic events when compared to some of the purely commercial...
View ArticleStarbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit
People often criticize asynchronous messaging solutions as too complicated and cumbersome. Or, they believe distributed solutions cannot be successful unless they include a distributed transaction...
View ArticleGood Composers are Few and Far in Between
Loosely coupled architectures are often portrayed as the holy grail of architecture. But all too often these architectures turn into what Martin Fowler coined the "Architect's dream but the developer's...
View ArticleEnemy of the State
One of my favorite pastimes is to argue with people whether a solution is stateless, whether it should be stateless and what it means to be stateless in the first place. Ideally, the debate would...
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