Data Unbound

As I try to sort through the hype of SOA, I found the following articles useful reads over the holidays:

• CIO Blogs – Is SOA Another Fake Path to IT Agility? . Yes, designing reusable services is not an easy process. I think that people need to learn how be discriminating “consumers” of services before they can become savvy “producers” Often they are trying to skip that first stage of learning.
• CIO Blogs – The Starting Point for SOA . It seems to make sense that portals could be as a good starting point for SOA implementations. Portals are easy to understand. You can do SOA implementations in steps.

A very good overview piece on enterprise architecture is A New Blueprint For The Enterprise – Enterprise Architecture – CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005, an article on the connections among services and an event-driven model. I like the notion of an EA Zoning Board. The article is matched with a good piece on enterprise architects, who they are and do and what signs of good architects: WANTED: Enterprise Architects – – CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005

It’s good to hear someone say that you can EA without an overarching business strategy: EA Without The Strategy – – CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005.

EA On The Cheap – – CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005 points out how to do things on the cheap — the most basic steps:

Doing enterprise architecture on the cheap means you have to forgo much of the planning and governance and focus instead on services and reusable integration. That may still mean investing in some developers who know Web services and buying some middleware to provide the integration glue that Web services lacks, but the CFO will be able to hold onto those old mainframes while watching IT become more responsive and quicker to deliver new capabilities from them.

what architects look for in other architects

Some quotes from: Master Builders – – CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005, in response to the question “What to look for in an architect?”:

• “Businesspeople tend to be extroverts, whereas 75 percent of IT people are introverts. You have to be able to relate to both.”
• “They need to have a passion for tying things together; they should be constantly thinking about the big picture.”
• “I would look for excitement and passion. If I ask them about a project they’ve worked on, I want them to say, ‘Oh yeah, you should have seen what we did,’ and then talk for the next 20 minutes. He didn’t just do it; he lived it.”
• “You can’t just talk a good game; you have to deliver. I would ask someone to give an example of a strategic project they’ve led that brought together business and IT. Get them to focus on the key attributes that made that project work. Also, they need to be able to speak strategically and know the right level of detail needed.”

I’m rather sympathetic to the view that IT Architects Must Write Code — or at least should be capable of writing prototyping code.

I find A Conversation with Werner Vogels quite an inspiring picture of what we might be able to build at UC.

Rice University News & Media:

Rice University and IBM will collaborate on the development of an open-standards-based, service-oriented architecture (SOA) that will help higher education institutions tie together their increasingly diverse academic software applications. The collaboration is supported in part by IBM’s Shared University Research award program, created to exemplify the deep partnership between academia and the industry to explore research in areas essential to innovation. Through the award and software from the IBM Academic Initiative, IBM has donated IBM BladeCenter hardware technology, software for an SOA platform and related services valued at $700,000.

Bubble redux? Perspectives CNET News.com:

You won’t find the big ideas that ignited breakthrough developments during this phase. With all due respect to their inventors, mashups don’t represent the apex of Silicon Valley’s creative genius. The truly exciting stuff still waits over the horizon. That’s where things are going to get more interesting.

MIT to try Python for introductory CS course (AMK’s Journal):

Philosophically, the material tries to follow a “practice-theory-practice” model: First, a task is presented and students work on it. Then, students learn the theory that underlies the problem presented, and finally the students tackle the problem again, given these better techniques, Kaelbling said.

» Interested in learning how to develop mashups? Welcome to Mashup U. Online Between the Lines ZDNet.com:

My personal belief is that mashup style software development, as ecosytems go, will easily overtake most other software development ecosystems in number of developers and applications. To help acclerate that process, ZDNet, in conjunction with Mashup University (the event) now brings Mashup U directly to you, on your desktop at no cost to you.

The “circle of life” — NonCartoonist’s comment on “Interested in learning how to develop mashups? Welcome to Mashup U. Online” TalkBack on ZDNet:

So, should we not use mash ups because they are easy to design and then hard to work with? No. They are part of the normal development process. “Pieces parts” or “Frankenstein” systems (now called “mash ups”) typically break ground in a new area. Once the paradigm is established the “vertical solutions” that are easier to maintain move in and take over. Mash ups (or what ever their next “nom de querre” will be) move on to break new ground in a new area. It’s all part of the cirle of life…

Possible alternatives to jython:

• Jepp – Java Embedded Python
• JPype – Java to Python integration

Nelson’s Weblog: tech / bad / whySoapSucks:

As someone who bears some past responsibility for well used SOAP services (Google’s APIs for search and AdWords) let me say now I’d never choose to use SOAP and WSDL again. I was wrong.

This morning, several of my colleagues and I listened to Planning and Delivering Service-Oriented Architecture, presented by Marty Backer and Christopher De Rosa, both of UCSD. (See the accompanying Powerpoint slides. Audio is also available from the presentation page.) I will recommend this talk to my colleagues and managers — there is a lot there.

Here I want to record the questions I asked during the session and my summary of the answers given:

• Have you used SOA in the context of academic/scholarly applications or only for administrative apps? Answer: There is a new app for academic personnel, which will include scholarly works.
• Have you consciously applied what we learn from mashups and other Web 2.0 approaches to SOA? That is, more lightweight service invocations (REST instead of SOAP, for instance.) Answer: Yes, they have followed mashups fairly closely. Their system does support multiple protocols. They build an internal service component and then wrap them. SOAP/WSDL…very interested in REST….lots of scripting language usage on campus.
• What type of education/traiing efforts are you putting into place for UCSD developers AND managers? Answer: The slides gives some answers.

new IT architecture books

Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee.

Today, after receiving my book order of Understanding Enterprise SOA and Semantics in Business Systems: The Savvy Managers Guide from amazon.com, I set out to start re-reading them in earnest. I’m looking to them to help shape my understanding of service-oriented architecture and the infrastructure we need to build for better data services on campus. There’s lot of hype around SOA; I’m trying to distill some concrete actions I can recommend for my colleagues and me to take with respect to SOA. Furthermore, how can I explain this topic quickly and effectively to people throughout the organization, specifically for my context, which is higher education.

A friend just asked me how the trackback mechanism actually works. I’ll refer him to the trackback technical specification
but want to link to an entry in my JazzUpTheWeb blog to see whether a trackback shows up.

later: yes, the reference worked but I learned that it’s a pingback, not a trackback, that is being used in wordpress.com.