Brent Carlson

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 SOA creates a phrase that every independent software vendor (ISV) wants a piece of. How do you sort out what is marketing hype from what is truly valuable and relevant to your organization's SOA efforts? Governance Scope Within an IT Organization Much of the hype around SOA governance has been focused on operational governance. Defining, tracking, and managing factors like service-level agreements (e.g., average response time, peak response time, average throughput, peak throughput) ... (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 of more workaday patterns. These are patterns that may be useful to only you and your team and might never be made into formal patterns or even shared outside of your group. In fact a pattern puri... (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 key Whitehorse concepts and capabilities that have been previously announced, and will put them into context with information on key forces, such as the Microsoft Dynamic Systems Initiative and the ... (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. These applications are just as difficult to maintain as existing applications, only they're running on yet another technical infrastructure. As ZapThink, LLC, an XML- and Web services-focused indu... (more)

Discovering and Documenting Business Application Patterns

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 applicati... (more)