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 ... (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)

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 requi... (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)

Software Reuse Is Dead, Long Live Software Reuse

I know what you're probably thinking as you look at the title of this article: "software reuse - been there, done that, and it doesn't work...." And it's true that many a software architect or project leader on a WebLogic project has broken his or her pick on the slag heap of reuse efforts and that the legacy of monolithic CASE tool suites has left a bad taste in many developers' mouths w... (more)