bliki tagged by: application integration
ApplicationBoundary
How do you define the boundary of an application?
DatabaseStyles
When I talk about databases and how they relate to applications, I've found it useful to distinguish between two styles of database: ApplicationDatabase and IntegrationDatabase. The difference between the two lies in whether the database is controlled and encapsulated within a single ApplicationBoundary.
24 May 2004
EvolutionarySOA
Can SOA be done with an agile approach?
12 September 2008
IntegrationDatabase
An integration database is a database which acts as the data store for multiple applications, and thus integrates data across these applications (in contrast to an ApplicationDatabase).
ProvideServiceStub
An important thought for anyone building services for a service oriented architecture. When you build your service, also build a service stub that your clients can use to test against. Such a stub should provide canned responses to a fixed set of requests, simulate error conditions, and be runnable on a client's machine. You'll need to ensure that the stub mimics the true systems behavior properly. By providing a stub for your clients, you make it much easier for your clients to use your service; which of course means that your service is more likely to be used.
2 December 2003
ServiceOrientedAmbiguity
Whenever ThoughtWorks rashly lets me out in front of a client, one question I'm bound to be asked is "what do you think of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)?" It's a question that's pretty much impossible to answer because SOA means so many different things to different people.
1 July 2005
ApplicationDatabase
I use the term Application Database for a database that is controlled and accessed by a single application, (in contrast to an IntegrationDatabase). Since only a single application accesses the database, the database can be defined specifically to make that one application's needs easy to satisfy. This leads to a more concrete schema that is usually easier to understand and often less complex than that for an IntegrationDatabase.
EnterpriseArchitecture
Just recently I've picked up a couple of bad reviews on Amazon for P of EAA because there is nothing in the book about enterprise architecture. Of course there's a good reason for that - the book is about enterprise application architecture, that is how to design enterprise applications. Enterprise architecture is a different topic, how to organize multiple applications in an enterprise into a coherent whole.
9 October 2003
HumaneRegistry
One of the features of the new world of services that SOA-gushers promoted was the notion of registries. Often this was described in terms of automated systems that would allow systems to automatically look up useful services in a registry and bind and consume those services all by themselves.
Well computers may look clever occasionally, but I didn't particularly buy that idea. While there might the be odd edge case for automated service lookup, I reckon twenty-two times out of twenty it'll be a human programmer who is doing the looking up.
1 December 2008
MultipleCanonicalModels
Scratch any large enterprise and you'll usually find some kind of group focused on enterprise-wide conceptual modeling. Most commonly this will be a data management group, occasionally they may be involved in defining enterprise-wide services. They are enterprise-wide because rather than focusing on the efforts of a single application they concentrate on integrating multiple applications.
21 July 2003
ServiceCustodian
Let's imagine a pretty world of SOA-happiness where the computing needs of an enterprise are split into many small applications that provide services to each other to allow effective collaboration. One fine morning a consumer service needs some information from a supplier service. The twist is that although the supplier service has the necessary data and processing logic to get this information, it doesn't yet expose that information through a service interface. The supplier has a potential service, but it isn't actually there yet.
14 November 2008
TolerantReader
One of the benefits of using web services is that it helps you to decouple various parts of a system. People can work on separate code-bases with some degree of separation. Although you get some decoupling, you cannot eliminate the coupling completely because the services still have to communicate to each other through their interfaces. The sad thing is that many teams make this coupling much worse than it should be.
9 May 2011