Friday, June 24, 2005

BPM

Nathan Lee has a good post on the use of BPM tools. Adding my own two cents. The potential for BPM is good for long running complex processes. But from an overhead and complexity perspective is it really providing the touted benefits?

The ability to stop, pause, branch and restart individual steps is pretty powerful in a complex long running process. This makes complex processes more supportable. However, despite the modeler's ease of use (webMethods version), these processes can be difficult to develop and deploy. They also add a large load to the infrastructure.

Some criteria to use: long running and lots of steps. High volume, low latency would not be the best fit for BPM. Unless of course you own stock in Sun or Intel. Other things to think about, does my process frequently stall while waiting on some action? Does it have multiple points where it can stall or wait for long periods? Do I need or want visibility into this while it is happening? Does the process take different paths based upon some filter(s)?

And last but not least, do I have a big honking server(s) to run it on?

Friday, June 17, 2005

The case for document-centric Web services development

The case for document-centric Web services development

I thought this was a good discussion. One part of the discussion I was particularly interested in was the WSDL first approach to doing web services. Ie instead of using some tool to autogenerate a service interface, develop your contract first. The reason I find this interesting is that the more I work with tools the more interoperability problems I see. Plus as one of the comments discusses, this can still lead to a brittle architecture.

Thursday, June 09, 2005

UPS

No not the big brown truck company. I really need to put this server on a ups. A really robust thunderstorm last night took it out for a couple of minutes. Not that it is all that critical but still a good practice. The surge protector keeps it from being fried and all. I just like see the continuous uptime.

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Describing Web Services and SOAs As Options Proliferate

Describing Web Services and SOAs As Options Proliferate

I'm still seeing more hype than actual real implementation. This article discusses some of the issues associated with the current WSDL spec. The more I work with vendors trying to implement web services, the more issues I see with this taking off as promised. Not only do vendors have to deliver the core functionality of their product, they now have to be integration experts. Up on the latest WS specs, and all other cross platform issues. One commenter on the above article makes the point that Web Services are going the way of EJB. EJB is used today but 90% of java development is around plain old java objects. Why? EJB became to complex to implement for the fast majority of developers. It appears that Web Services could head down that same path as the standards around continue to proliferate.