David Linthicum

I caught a review in Fast Company of an interview that Craig Newmark of Craigslist had with ABC's Nightline News. I didn't see the interview myself, but Fast Company did a good job highlighting the more important points, including the fact that Craigslist, which offer free classi... (more)

Web services were created around the notion that it’s easier to discover and leverage somebody else’s service, rather than write your own from scratch.  Also, it's much easier to create applications made up of many services, allowing change to occur at a pace faster t... (more)

The notion of building bridges to service providers and managing the interaction will become more commonplace in 2006 as we learn to accept that many services we leverage within an enterprise are services we may not host. The technology exists today. We need to define and refine ... (more)

We are moving toward a day when most of our enterprise applications may be delivered as services, and thus provide a more economical way to approach information technology management with businesses going forward. This is also the great equalizer since businesses, large and small... (more)

Truth be told, traditional approaches to integration are really about keeping persistence at the points, within the source or target systems, and replicating data as needed. However with the use of true services, there is a clear advantage in keeping some persistence at a central... (more)

Web services were created around the notion that it's easier to discover and leverage somebody else's service rather than write your own from scratch. Also, it is much easier to create applications made up of many services, thereby allowing change to occur at a pace faster than a... (more)

Why do we do what we do? I mean, why do we design and implement SOAs? The truth is we do so to improve our business, thereby making it more adaptable and ready to accept change without major disruptions. However, what does this mean to the bottom line? These days, IT architects ... (more)

As we discussed last month, performance is often an afterthought when building new systems, including SOAs. We're finding that services and SOAs fall victim to this oversight as well. Indeed, there is a right way and a wrong way to design a service and an SOA. Also, there are thi... (more)

Performance is often an afterthought when building new systems, and I'm finding that services are no exception. Truth be told, most services out there just function. They are not optimized to scale, and SOAs are running into walls as those services hit the upper limit. If we don'... (more)

Building an SOA usually means leveraging a loosely coupled-type architecture. While the benefits of a loosely coupled SOA with many services are apparent, the operational characteristics can be a nightmare. However, with a bit of planning, and the use of some standards, your SOA ... (more)

As we bring our SOAs online using Web Services, we all know that SOAP is the standards message transfer protocol. But the interface description language for Web Services (WSDL) isn't specifically for SOAP. It's more generic. A SOAP-centric contract description language for Web Se... (more)

Since the beginning of computing we've been dealing with the notion of coupling, or the degree to which one component is dependent on another component in both the domain of an application or an architecture. Lately, the movement has been towards loose coupling for some very good... (more)

I just got back from the Gartner Application Integration show. This is perhaps the seventh of these conferences I attended, including the first one back in 1998. The good news is that the conference was packed and application integration seems to be making a strong resurgence wit... (more)

As I work with corporate America, as well as the government, I'm finding that services-oriented architectures (SOAs) are like snowflakes - no two are alike. I'm also finding that everyone has their own definition of SOA, and I've seen everything from messaging systems to portals ... (more)

Want to leverage your enterprise's Web services? Chances are you'll be enabling or exposing existing application services and not building new. This should come as no surprise to anyone. However, while we've been focusing on the development of new services, how to do it, and what... (more)

Software design has always been a focus for developers, but as we cycled through different approaches, standards, and architectures over the years, I think we've had a tendency not to pay enough attention to the fundamentals of software engineering. Clearly I've seen a decline in... (more)

Let's face it, we're going mobile. You only need to consider how you communicate these days to understand that. I, for one, find that my Blackberry is becoming my e-mail terminal of choice, as well as my best source of information via the WAP-enabled Web browser built-in. And oh ... (more)

Since the advent of Web services, and other distributed computing standards for that matter, we've been wrestling with the notion of identity and how to manage it. Truth-be-told identity management has been put on the back burner as organizations attempt to get their first Web s... (more)

As we look to make more practical use of Web services, the need has emerged for a better user interface; one that's neither too fat nor too thin. An interface that allows developers to make the most out of the client's native features, while at the same time, not bogging the clie... (more)

Service-oriented architecture, or SOA, is the modern notion of connecting systems together at both the information and service levels. Indeed, enterprises are racing to enable their existing applications to externalize services, as well as build the appropriate integration infras... (more)