David Linthicum

Making solutions scale is nothing new. However, the SOA technology and approaches employed recently are largely untested with higher application and information and service management traffic loads. SOA implementers are happy just to get their solutions up and running, but, in ma... (more)

If you've kept up with SaaS and SOA you know that Salesforce.com does an on-demand SOA solution. Apex is its on-demand development and deployment platform, including a complete development environment, programming language, database, and now the ability to create, expose, and con... (more)

While the notion of SOA continues to emerge, those who are implementing SOAs today are faced with a variety of challenges, including the complexities of SOA, and the work involved with understanding their existing problem domain and requirements. Those who want to get SOA right t... (more)

This is the larger issue, as I see it, and is very visible to me working both in the world of SOA and the world of enterprise architecture. So, why are they different worlds? Moreover, what is enterprise architecture, and how does it fit with reference models and reference archit... (more)

This content is reprinted from Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters published by SYS-CON Books. To order the entire book now along with companion DVDs for the special pre-order price, click here for more information. Aimed at everyone from enterprise developers to self-taught ... (more)

This content is reprinted from Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters published by SYS-CON Books. To order the entire book now along with companion DVDs for the special pre-order price, click here for more information. Aimed at everyone from enterprise developers to self-taught ... (more)

While there are SOA reference architectures all over the place, including mine, the best known SOA reference architecture is defined by OASIS. Here is their definition, albeit a work in progress: "A reference architecture is a description of how to build a class of artifacts. An... (more)

A few people who have been reading my blog and this column, and listening to my podcast, as well as reading other SOA blogs and articles, have become a bit confused pertaining to the notions of: SOA Reference Model(s) SOA Reference Architecture(s) And how all of this works and p... (more)

First, the history. Data integration is the name the vendors have adopted to replace the ETL (Extract Translate Load), data cleansing, and data warehousing tools of days gone by. These tools actually pre-date the notion of EAI, and were really the first sets of technology design... (more)

I'm consulting now...at the project and strategy levels...and finding that a lot of real work needs to be done to get SOAs up and running. For most organizations, the first step of their SOA project is to figure out how much this SOA will cost. So you can budget appropriately and... (more)

A few of my clients are now looking to staff their first inroads into SOA, their first project where something actually happens beyond the investigation. So...how many people are needed on the project? Who are they? What are their roles? Here are some rough guidelines based upon ... (more)

So, what do AJAX and SOA have in common? The answer: Everything. Is AJAX an enterprise technology? The answer: Absolutely. As we move to next-generation enterprise architectures using newer notions such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), there's a need for a dynamic Web inte... (more)

Working directly on SOA projects as an independent I'm exposed to many more organizations than when I was building technology. As such, I see some common patterns or issues emerging. The largest and most disturbing is the fact that there seems to be a huge chasm yawning between ... (more)

Last month an alliance of leading vendors announced progress on specifications to define a language-neutral programming model for application development in SOA environments. They call this specification Open SOA Collaboration. In essence, they are proposing a new standard to cre... (more)

Right now the implementation of SOAs seems involve much more hype than actual work. However, there are some patterns beginning to emerge, or, procedures the implementers are doing right to insure success. These patterns are not always obvious, so perhaps this is a good time to le... (more)

Let's face it, WS-BPEL 1.1 was not a great standard, and left so much out that many end users and vendors found it useless. In response, the vendors put a ton of proprietary extensions in their BPEL 1.1-based products, thus diluting its value to the point of "Why bother?" This wa... (more)

What is unique about an SOA is that it's as much of a strategy as a set of technologies, and it's really more of a journey than a destination. Moreover, it's a notion that is dependent upon specific technologies or standards, such as Web services and interface technology, but rea... (more)

So what's hot these days in the world of SOA? Governance, registries, orchestration...? Nope. As folks looking to implement SOA seek that first killer project the emphasis is on what to do, not what you use, and that's exactly the right way to think. As SOA becomes more of a real... (more)

It has come to my attention that there are really two kinds of SOA technology vendors out there, old school and new school - each offering very different approaches to solving the SOA problem. I'm not going to mention any particular vendors, but you guys can guess who they are. ... (more)

There is a lot of talk about how SOA will significantly lower the need for developers, thus the savings of SOA. This will be accomplished through the promise of reuse that's driving many toward the SOA light. However, I'm not sure we'll see a reduction in development with the adv... (more)