Service Architecture - SOA

Requirements Landfill - the challenge of central services

2009-10-26T23:03:00.006Z

Enterprise Services of any type from Business Services like procurement through to technical infrastructure services such as Identity management are all at risk from a threat of pollution. I call this threat the requirements landfill.One of the key principles of SOA in operation has been the ability to have services which are used across the enterprise. These single services represent a single

Data Accuracy isn't always important

2009-10-21T03:17:00.003+01:00

Now while Amex really should have understood the term minimum there are examples where it really isn't an issue if someone gets it wrong in displaying the information to you. Sometimes this indicates that a prediction has been incorrect or that "approximately" is good enough for this scenario.Is a good example of this, the current temperature on the Sydney Morning Herald site is listed as one

When you know it isn't a cloud

2009-10-13T19:58:00.003+01:00

Following up on the previous post I thought I'd do the REALLY obvious ones that indicate it isn't a cloud. James' list wasn't nearly cynical enough in light of the things that are claimed to be a cloud.So here goesIf its just a single website with no backups storing stuff to disk then its just a standard WEBSITE not a cloud (Hello Sidekick)If its a physical box that is meant to help you manage a

How you know a phone is rubbish

2009-10-13T10:21:00.004+01:00

My ever perceptive wife Heather spotted something the other day about mobile phone adverts. They basically come in two flavoursiPhone adsThe restThe difference between them is simple here are the apple ones, first from when it launchedand an "there is an app for that" oneNow for the competition: SamsungMicrosoftand (with the Omnia)and Google's Android (via HTC)See the difference? The Mrs did

Not a cloud? Then what is it?

2009-10-12T13:23:00.002+01:00

Redmonk are one of those smaller analyst companies who make up for a lack of numbers with a refreshing depth and honesty. James Governor's latest, and I assume light hearted, view of "15 Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing" however does a bit of a disservice to the debate around clouds. Mostly right but with a few glaring pieces I felt I had to disagree with.If you peel back the label and its

Alternative Engineering

2009-10-06T09:11:00.003+01:00

Dan Creswell pointed me towards an interesting blog on Cargo Cults and Computing on the same day I looked at this video on YouTube...Then yesterday I was talking with someone who is helping dig out a project that has been driven into the ground by some people with very firm beliefs about how things should be done these were people who had taken pieces from agile, from waterfall, from TOGAF, from

American Express - Which number is greater?

2009-10-05T17:03:00.004+01:00

Sometimes you just sit there and wonder about how the code managed to get to a certain end point... take my current Amex online bill...Now it could be the surprise that its the lowest monthly bill I've had since I got the card, but I don't quite think that "surprise" is something that should be built into a financial system. But some how the amount that I have to pay (the last bill) is now less

In praise of vendor shipped AMI's and virtual machines

2009-10-03T19:23:00.004+01:00

Roman Stanek is one of those guys who consistently gets things right and his point around AMIs and Virtual Machines not being SaaS is absolutely 100% spot on. These aren't SaaS solutions they are PaaS solutions and they do indeed leave a huge amount of work for the developer to do. Part of the problem is of course that the name Software as a Service is of course wrong its really Service as a

Why do games need an operating system?

2009-10-01T17:40:00.003+01:00

Using my iPhone and looking at a PS3 console in Selfridges made me think about what the future could hold for games. While there are companies looking at doing server side games and a VDI solution to the end device I just don't think that matches against Moore's Law. But equally the model of downloading and installing loads of games onto a single device with multiple different anti-piracy tools

REST Blueprints and Reference Architectures

2009-09-24T08:34:00.004+01:00

Okay so the REST-* stuff appears to have rapidly descended into pointless diatribe which is a shame. One of the questions is what it should be instead (starting with REST-TX and REST-Messaging wasn't a great idea) and around a few internal and external discussions its come down to a few pointsWhat is "best practice"What is the standard way to document the interactions available & requiredHow do

Theory v Practice - the opposite view

2009-09-21T10:11:00.000+01:00

There is an age old sayingIn theory, practice and theory are the same thing, in practice they aren'tThis is true 90% of the time, but in Engineering it isn't always the case. I was speaking to someone a day or so ago about interviews and they were nervous as the job they were applying for required a specific programming skill and they had only done "a bit" of it.What I told this poor young fool

REST-* can you please grow up

2009-09-16T13:37:00.004+01:00

Well didn't Mark Little just thrown in a grenade today around REST-* by daring to suggest that maybe just maybe there needs to be a bit more clarity on how to use REST effectively.As he said this "The REST-* effort might end up documenting what already exists which indicates that part of the challenge is that lots of people don't really know what REST is and certainly struggle as they look to

Business Utilities are about levers not CPUs

2009-09-16T09:42:00.005+01:00

"As a Service" is a moniker tagged against a huge number of approaches. Often it demonstrates a complete marketing and intelligence fail and regularly it just means a different sort of licensing model."As a Service" tends to mean utility pricing and the best "As a Service" offers have worked out both what their service is and what its utility is. Salesforce.com have a CRM/Sales Support service

Why I like Open Source documentation

2009-09-02T17:33:00.003+01:00

I've got someone creating a structured Semantic Wiki for me at the moment and we are using Semantic Forms. One of the things we needed to do was pre-populate the fields. This means something like{{#forminput:form_name|size|value|button_text|query_string}}With the query string set... The documentation saidquery_string is the set of values that you want passed in through the query string to the

What conference calls tell us about REST

2009-08-20T15:32:00.002+01:00

I've just got off a conference call, the topic isn't important. What is important is that at the end of the call lots of other people started joining. Why was this? Well they were joining the next call that the meeting organiser had.This got me thinking about REST and resource identifiers and why if you are doing REST its really important to understand what the right resource is. With

Start on the road to SaaS with SPUD

2009-08-06T13:24:00.003+01:00

Lots of companies are leaping onto SaaS in the manner of a drowning man grabbing onto a tiger shark in the vain hope that all will be fine. The problem is that they haven't really thought about what they want and what it takes to properly adopt SaaS so what they do is take the same old approach to package adoptionWork out what you want to doBuy a package/SaaS solution to do some of itCustomise

Vendor Managed Infrastructure - Are clouds just a VMI solution?

2009-07-03T16:02:00.003+01:00

Tweeting with Neil Ward-Dutton I had a thought about what he has written on public v private clouds and it made me think that the only real difference between them is in the who manages and pays. This might sound like a big thing but taking a leaf out of the retailers book it doesn't need to be that large.Vendor Managed Inventory is simply where a supplier takes over the management of a products

When successful systems go bad - boiling frogs with Technical Debt

2009-06-25T21:48:00.000+01:00

One of the challenges I often see in companies is when successful systems go bad. These aren't the systems that were delivered 3 times over time and 5 times the budget, these are the systems that many years ago delivered real benefits for the business and delivered in a reasonable time and budget.The problem is that all those years ago the team in question was focused absolutely on getting the

Religion as a Service

2009-06-24T07:34:00.002+01:00

Okay a few weeks ago I had a brain-wave for a new business. What do you really need for a business to take off in the "as a Service" space?It needs to be 80%+ commodityYou need a large customer baseYou need the end customer to add their own differentiationAbove all I wanted a business that would be a much higher margin one than simply a SaaS business, which meant including the actual business

The Clint Eastwood school of change

2009-06-18T01:53:00.002+01:00

Change is hard, change against people who don't want to change is extremely hard bordering on impossible. In any change programme therefore you need to be clear about what you are up against and what success looks like.This is where Clint Eastwood can help. Sure Chuck Norris can run around the world and punch himself in the back of the head but Clint Eastwood has many more lessons on delivering

Why would a cloud appliance be physical?

2009-06-16T08:14:00.004+01:00

IBM often lead in technology areas and with the history of LPAR on the mainframe they've got a background in virtualisation that most competitors would envy. So clearly with cloud they are going to go after it. Sometimes they'll do what they did with SOA and tag a (IMO) dog of a product with the new buzzword (MQSI = Advanced ESB - I'm looking at you) and other times they will actually do

Single Canonical Form? Only Suicidal Dinosaurs need apply

2009-06-12T10:15:00.004+01:00

Now I said a while ago that Single Canonical form wasn't for SOA well now I've been doing some SaaS projects and I've realised with traditional modesty that not only am I right, but that people who are still pushing it as an approach can be described as suicidal dinosaurs.If SaaS is anywhere in your future, and it will be unless you are a military secure establishment and even then it might me,

The challenge of "build for the web" to SaaS economic models

2009-06-01T23:28:00.001+01:00

Build for the web is a strong meme. Most of the time people focus on the technical elements of this and the end user elements. What I haven't seen people talk about much is the impact that this has on the current financial models from SaaS vendors. SaaS can give great benefits for companies by enabling an OpEx rather than CapEx model but the solutions today do assume that a person is using them

SaaS and the Cloud a development challenge

2009-06-01T08:58:00.000+01:00

A while back I blogged on how to do ERP with a middleware solution. The point was to leave the package untouched while adding your customisations in an environment that was better suited to the challenge. It made upgrades easier and also would help to reduce your development timescales.Well the world is moving on and now I'm looking at a challenge of SaaS + cloud. A standardised package

Will Apple dominate the cloud?

2009-05-25T14:57:00.005+01:00

At dinner the other night with a friend we were talking about what we wanted the iPhone to do. We agreed that a new camera would be good but neither of us thought that a forward facing camera had any point as we don't know anyone who has made more than two video calls despite having phones that could do it.So what we thought would be really good for the 4th Generation iPhone? In particular what