Aug 16
Business vs technical logic
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: , . | icon4 08 16th, 2006| icon31 Comment »

Andrew Ferrier draws up an interesting distinction between business and, what he calls, technical logic.

  • Technical logic: Stuff we don’t want to do, but need to in order for everything to work.
  • Business logic: Stuff we do want to do - the reason we’re doing all this. We can not only decide on how to implement this (as we can with technical logic), we can also decide not to implement it all, or to implement different logic.

As someone who spends his days recommending clients not to put business logic in the integration layer, a simple definition like this one is quite handy. And while this definition might not be complete, it’s good enough for initial discussions.

Aug 14
Synapse
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: , . | icon4 08 14th, 2005| icon3No Comments »

A new project, Synapse, has been proposed for Apache incubation. The project aims to build an ESB/broker that will complement the Apache WS stack. The main initiators of the proposal are some of the Apache WS heavyweights like Dims. While I still need some convincing of whether “the principles of service oriented architectures” is the final solution to integration, the proposal is interesting. If the project is successful (and I have no doubts it will) it will be a strong contender in the quickly evolving ESB/BPM/JBI space. It sure will be interesting to see how it will stand up against the giants, primarily IBM’s WBI and BEA’s AquaLogic. History has shown that open-source software can be very successful in the middleware space. Since that has made app servers commondity, this area has lately attracted a lot of interest from the vendors as a way of building added value on their existing infrastructure. One can not help but wondering how long that will last.

I must say that I’m a but surprised that the ServiceMix people doesn’t seem to be involved in this. It does seem to fit them like a glove, maybe some more people-level integration is needed?

Update: seems like the ServiceMix are joining in

May 3
Mediation
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 05 3rd, 2005| icon3No Comments »

As usual, Sean McGrath nails it. His hypothesis is that EAI integration is all about dispute resolution. As someone working every day with EAI integration (more on that soon) I couldn’t agree more. We spend all our time mediating systems as well as people. The people building applications are just as different as applications themselves. This means being in a room with 60 year old guys who knows Cobol/RPG/APL inside out as well as the 25 year olds who loves .NET/J2EE. And to get them and their applications talking to each other. The methods for getting an application to exchange data has varied greatly during the last 25 years and we need to handle them all.

It’s a very interesting and challenging job (btw, if your interested and based in Sweden, contact me).

Jan 30
IBM on process integration
icon1 Niklas | icon2 Tags: . | icon4 01 30th, 2005| icon3No Comments »

IBM are running a series of articles on process modelling and integration best practises using the IBM WBI stack (MQ, WBI SF, WBI Modeller). The index page contains links to new articles as they are published, part 5 is out but not yet on the index page.

IBM’s integration products has been going through a major change the last couple of years, and more to come. Some years ago all they had was MQSeries, after buying NEON and Crossworlds they had solutions for message brokering (WBI Message Broker) as well as advanced process integration (InterChange Server). Now, with WBI Server Foundation they are consolidating much of their product family into a more homogeneous stack based on a common runtime (WAS). I think that there are interesting times ahead.