Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot

Application Virtualisation

Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 8th Apr, 2008

I came across a great post on Adam Hall’s blog talking about aspects of application virtualisation. I’ve only come across this recently to tell you the truth, with the rollout of SoftGrid here at IOMG, and have been pretty impressed with what the package achieves.
So what is application virtualisation you may ask? It’s a process [...]

Five things SOA vendors are missing

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 11th Feb, 2008

Excellent post by David Linthicum on Infoworld today talking about 5 things that SOA vendors need to do to get in order to be more successful. If you’re in the SOA space you’ll be able to relate to these points; especially if you’re on the bleeding end of trying to implement a product suite that [...]

The Twitter Debate

Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 17th Jan, 2008

There are some interesting conversations on Techmeme at the moment discussing the merits and downfalls of Twitter. It seems to have been sparked off by Twitter falling over during the MacWorld keynote speech and made more public Dave Winer discussing whether Twitter would be more stable if it were decentralised, but there’s a very interesting [...]

BizTalk 2006 R2 Released

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 14th Sep, 2007

After month of testing, it’s nice to see that Microsoft have finally pushed BizTalk 2006 R2 out to the world. Here’s the blurb:
With the introduction of the fifth full version, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 builds upon the Business Process Management and SOA/ESB capabilities in prior releases to help organizations extend core process management technologies even [...]

Bringing the Publish-Subscribe to a webpage near you ..

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 31st Aug, 2007

Google has opened up some new potential in their Gadgets API by allowing gadgets to communicate with one another. As you can imagine gadgets on a page can either be there or not, so communication has to be loosely coupled between the two. They achieve this using a Publish-Subscribe model (pub/sub). Designing gadget topology to [...]

Fallacies of Distributed Computing

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 20th Aug, 2007

I came across a Wikipedia page on the Fallacies of Distributed Computing. Read these and tell me if they ring any bells:

The network is reliable.
Latency is zero.
Bandwidth is infinite.
The network is secure.
Topology doesn’t change.
There is one administrator.
Transport cost is zero.
The network is homogeneous.

Great aren’t they? If you’ve worked in IT for any measuable amount of [...]

Security vs Access

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 23rd Mar, 2007

It’s interesting to see how the right sort of tension in the workplace can bring about better results in what a team is trying to achieve. I’m working on a long term project at the moment for the Isle of Man Government, which is tasked with putting a number of services online for citizens to [...]

Inside Myspace

Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 25th Jan, 2007

Here’s an excellent article called Inside Myspace by David F. Carr. It traces the steps MySpace had to go through as they grew from a small website to a social network with technology that needs to handle almost 40 billion page requests a month. The article talks about the architectural decisions that were taken as [...]

Pragmatic Architecture: Layering

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 27th Oct, 2006

Ted Neward has a brilliant article on MSDN entitled: Pragmatic Architecture: Layering. In it he reexamines the whole concept of splitting an application up into tiers, particularly looking at the why and more importantly when; as is WHEN is it applicable to take the hit of the additional rise in deployment complexity and cost of [...]

Conceptualizing the Enterprise Architecture Space

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 31st May, 2006

Interesting take on Enterprise Architecture by Suresh on SkyScrapr where he paints a picture of what he things the focus of Enterprise Architecture should look like:

The diagram describes a lot, but there’s more details on his post. Check it out.
Skyscrapr - Strategic Architecture : Conceptualizing the Enterprise Architecture Space

Skyscrapr

Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 25th May, 2006

Just came across Skyscrapr which looks like a Microsoft-funded initiative to pull all things architectural under one umbrella. The blurb on the site says:
Skyscrapr is your window
on the architectural perspective. Discover the different disciplines of system
architecture, as well as perspectives on building successful systems. Check out our
architects’ blogs, learn about industry trends, download webcasts, watch [...]

Should Government consolidate citizen identities across it’s systems?

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 10th May, 2006

Interesting approach on the subject of “One Consolidated View of the Citizen” by Richard Allen who outlines the arguments against having a common identifier against citizens in Government databases. The gist of his argument can be found in the last paragraph where he states:
So, to summarise. One common identifier across all government systems means less [...]

Event-Driven Architectures

Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 14th Jul, 2005

Gregor Hohpe posts a great article based on the talk he gave at TechEd this year. His talk was about event-driven architectures, with a particular focus on Composability, the ability to build new things from existing pieces. This is a great concept, especially in the view of development and maintenance practices with cost reduction and [...]

What is a Service Orinted Architecture?

Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 17th May, 2005

Came across a great article that explains quite succinctly what a Service-Oriented Architecture is all about. Read here

Top-Down vs Bottom-up SOA

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 21st Mar, 2005

Excellent post on David Chappell’s blog

The best approach to creating a service-oriented environment is obvious. Start by understanding the business, probably by grasping the most important business processes and determining which applications underlie those processes. Once you’ve figured out the business services that software implements, you can wrap existing apps and create new ones to [...]