Loosely Coupled

I'm fascinated by all the context sensitive/targeted media that is making it's way into the mainstream. The other day I was reading an email from my wife having to do with bringing some milk home and something about a recent trip we had taken. The Google ads on this page were some that you'd expect - one on how to save gas, another for a baking product. The one that really surprised me was an ad for silica gel?!? Silica gel is a moisture absorber and usually found in the little packets that say "Do Not Eat" included when you buy a new pair of sneakers and many other products. This was intriguing to me because there was no mention of anything related to this in the body of the message. However, my wife works for a company that produces these products and sent the email from her work address. Not only was AdSense was smart enough to pick up on the from address and trace it back to an actual company, it knew what the company produces, and suggested an approp...

In this week's StackOverflow podcast , Joel Spolsky describes cognitive dissonance - and it may help explain the the JCAPS love fest at my current client. This conversation happens around the 11-minute mark. I knew there had to be a name for this ...

I know I need to let this go, but I can't stop thinking about the nonsense of this BPMN -> JCAPS -> .Net web service architecture proposed by management at the client I'm working with. The main reason for the base web services to be implemented in .Net rather than directly in JCAPS is that this organization has 10x as many .Net developers as it has Java/JCAPS developers. The thinking is that this ratio will make it easier to find available bodies to maintain and enhance these services. While this makes sense, any guess on how many people know BPMN? A small handful... all of them contractors. There's not even a BPMN modeling tool in place at the company. Yet they're convinced this is the way to go. Is it reasonable to expect business users to create BPMN models? While I realize the GUI interface makes it less like "coding", I think that it'd be helpful to have a basic understanding of boolean logic, parallelism, and exception processing in cre...

Come hell or high water - this company is hell bent on including JCAPS as part of it's enterprise architecture, even though it doesn't plan to use any of the features that might set it apart from it competitors or open source alternatives. The long-term plan here is for the business users to use a BPMN-compliant tool (not the one from JCAPS) to create the business processes. These processes will integrate web service calls, creating a sort of business mashup of these services. The services will be written in .Net, not JCAPS. The only place JCAPS enters the equation is as the platform to run the BPEL generated from the BPMN. Make any sense? Not to me. Isn't a BPEL engine included in Glassfish? I'm sure this is just one of several free or low cost alternatives to execute BPEL. What I can't figure out is this company's infatuation with JCAPS. Given the shortcomings they've encountered already, why they are so intent on looking for more places to impleme...