Brent Carlson

Over the past two months, we've looked at the process of extracting a business application pattern from a series of business requirements. You've seen this pattern take shape, from its original form as a design meeting the specific needs of a particular business application (configurable product balance information) through an initial abstraction that was modified by other business requirements to reach its final form. In this article, the last of a three-part series, we'll look at applying the key pattern and cached balances pattern (with others) to the construction of applications, components, and Web services. Reviewing Our Pattern Last month's article concluded with a definition of our business application patterns: keys and cached balances. We tracked the maturation... (more)

Discovering and Documenting Business Application Patterns

You're probably saying to yourself, "Oh, no! Not another patterns article!" Technically, that's what this is. However, instead of simply showing you a finished pattern, we're going to look at pattern discovery. And, while what we'll talk about can help you capture fundamental patterns (that is, if there are any fundamental patterns left to be defined) we're going to focus on the capture ... (more)

SOA Governance Best Practices – Architectural, Organizational, and SDLC Implications

The fact that you're reading this article means that you are probably planning a service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiative and recognize that some level of governance is required in order to be successful. If you are like most people in this position, you are also somewhat confused as to the meaning of SOA governance. Governance is the current buzzword, and combining governance with... (more)

Whitehorse

With Whitehorse, Microsoft has placed a significant stake in the ground when it comes to modeling enterprise services. While Whitehorse is part of the not-yet-released Visual Studio 2005 (codenamed "Whidbey"), Microsoft has publicly discussed and demonstrated significant elements of Whitehorse, and alpha code is currently in use by select Microsoft customers. This article will discuss ke... (more)

Putting Web Services into (Business) Context

Web services tool vendors frequently compete on how quickly their users can "generate a Web service from scratch" or "expose a Java/COM+/CORBA class as a Web service." While speed of development is important, the broader business needs of an enterprise must be the main driver of new technology adoption. Blindly applying new technology ultimately results in more poorly conceived software. ... (more)