Loosely Coupled

In the midst of a job change, I've been spending most of the last few weeks handing my work off to others and writing some final documentation. With that almost complete, I'm turning my attention to my new position where I'll be working to integrate systems together in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). While I have SOA experience (creating & integrating web services as well as CORBA modules) my new company has chosen the Java Composite Application Suite (JCAPS) as it's SOA platform. It's (by far) the most comprehensive SOA solution I've had opportunity to work with. I'm really excited to get started. Here are some things I really like about the architecture and questions I have. The system is built on an application server and includes things like messaging, as well as consolidated user management and role based access built in. This is a big change from my current situation where I've needed to integrate (and implement) a lot of this f...

I've been hearing a lot of buzz about QEDWiki, which is being developed at IBM. QEDWiki is a basically a wiki that can host simple web components. At first glance, QEDWiki looks like a typical portal, displaying aggregated information from around the web in widgets. Think dashboards like PageFlakes or My Yahoo . I soon learned that QEDWiki is something completely different. My perception changed when I saw these widgets linked together, creating what IBM calls "situational applications". A "situational application" is a simple applications created on the fly using information provided through a web service. These applications can be created by business users, for business users - without the support of a development team - very much like the advanced Excel applications created and shared today by business teams. I see something like QEDWiki taking the place of these apps with Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) playing the role of the Excel "s...