Over the past few years I’ve been helping a lot of government clients
design and implement architectures for information-sharing. When it comes
to information-sharing one of the most important aspects is the relationships
in the data being shared because it’s those relationships that provide the
context to help you understand and utilize the information better. Within
an enterprise, key data types are often dispersed across multiple systems so
a lot of the things we did included implementing data services (i.e.
SOAP/WSDL-based Web Services) on top of each of these systems to provide
shared access to the underlying data. While this approach does help share
the systems’ underlying data with the rest of the enterprise, you still end
up with these web services providing “islands of information”. I.e. the
relationships across the data being shared were not exposed an... (more)
Enterprise information integration (EII) is getting a lot of hype these days,
and the vendors are giving you very compelling reasons for why you need an
enterprise data access layer based on their EII product. However, a lot of
the scenarios and case studies they present are very targeted or are simple
examples of how their product works that don't delve into the complexities of
a real-world environment. This article presents some of those complexities
and demonstrates how some of the EII products may not provide adequate
functionality for an environment with such complexities.
... (more)
It has become very popular to build web sites that use and embed widgets from
various providers. For example, MySpace and Facebook let their users easily
embed various JavaScript widgets and Flash-based applications and videos onto
their personal pages. In most cases, the widgets act in a standalone fashion,
unaware of the other widgets contained on the same page. Standalone widgets
are fine for simple portal pages but for more targeted applications some
level of interaction among the components on the page is needed. When such
interactions are needed, they are usually achieved t... (more)
In a previous post, I talked about how EA can be used to influence SOA to
provide the strategic perspective. Here are some more thoughts along those
lines, with some guidance on service-oriented analysis using DODAF views.
I mentioned that SOA should be aligned to the organization's strategic
objectives and that EA can help drive this. So how?
The DODAF defines a view called the OV-1 (high level operational concept)
that describes/depicts the key entities (i.e. operational nodes), their
activities, and interactions in support of the organization's mission(s). So
once the organizati... (more)
I've recently asked one of my developers to research some integration and
middleware technologies for a project we're working on. After spending a
couple days on this, he said to me "these things are all part of ESBs now" -
i.e. all the integration and middleware vendors have pretty much taken these
capabilities and bundled them into their ESB platforms.
"Oh you need a message bus? That's part of our ESB now." "Oh you need this
adapter? That's included in our ESB."
In most cases when you're implementing an SOA, you will need some piece of
middleware or integration technology. With ... (more)
Tieu Luu works at SuprTEK where he helps the U.S. government create and implement strategies and architectures that apply innovative technologies and approaches in IT. You can read more of Tieu’s writing at his blog at http://tieuluu.com/blog.
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