Enterprise Integration Patterns: Gregor's RamblingsGregor's Ramblings on Enterprise IntegrationThe Dark Side of Encapsulation- (Found July 2, 2008 ) Encapsulation and abstraction are the holy grail of today's software development. One of the great successes of hiding the implementation details under a common, abstracted interface are TCPIP stacks. But as so often, overwhelming success can also have a flip side.http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/05_encapsulation.html Hysteresis of Design Decisions- (Found July 2, 2008 ) Design decisions can be influenced by many factors. In order to make matters more predictable, many architects look for clear-cut borderlines. How complex does my screen navigation have to be in order to justify a Front Controller as opposed to a Page Controller How complex does my integration problem have to be to justify use of an EAI suite instead of hand wiring the solution Invariably, the answer is "it depends". Let's have a closer look at why that is so.http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/06_hysteresis.html No Escape From Integration- (Found July 2, 2008 ) I had never thought about having guest appearances on my ramblings, but this e-mail response from my friend Hyon made me laugh hard enough that I think it would be a waste not to share it with the community.http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/07_noescape.html Integration Styles- (Found July 2, 2008 ) A number of integration books classify integration into styles such as database integration, functional integration and so on. However, on closer examination it turns out that there is a fair amount of confusion about what these styles really mean. Let me give my view.http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/08_integrationstyles.html JavaOne Redux- (Found July 2, 2008 ) For a change I spoke at a conference without traveling halfway around the world. At over 15,000 attendees, JavaOne is one of the largest developer conferences. Unfortunately, the signal-to-noise ratio is not always all that great, but it is still a good place to meet old and new friends. This year's conference was littered with talk and demos on SOA, ESB, Web Services, orchestration etc. Here my impressions...http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/10_javaone.html Visualizing Dependencies- (Found July 2, 2008 ) Many of you have seen my rants on doodleware and top-down modeling. At the same time, anyone who has seen my book must believe me when I say that I am a very visual person. Is Gregor going schizophrenic (or becoming a hypocrite) Not at all! I am a big fan of visual representations that are harvested from an actual running system and present the user with an accurate, big picture view of a working system. I felt it was time to put some money (time) where my mouth is and try to build such a...http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/11_dependencies.html Web Services Jeopardy- (Found July 2, 2008 ) It is nearly impossible to keep track of all the Web Services (WS-) specifications or proposed "standards". The matter is only worsened by the many competing proposals. Should you be using WS-Eventing or WS-Notification How about WS-Reliability vs. WS-ReliableMessaging Even if you choose the "right" specification, it still is likely to evolve over time. So are these standards useful at all for Web Services development today I contend that they are, albeit in a somewhat unconventional way....http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/12_jeopardy.html Dependency Injection in Messaging Architectures- (Found July 2, 2008 ) The notion of Dependency Injection or Inversion of Control has generated quite a bit of interest lately. To a large extend, the move towards this architectural style is driven by developer's dissatisfaction with strong dependencies of individual components on their run-time container (for example, J2EE). These dependencies make it difficult or impossible to test components outside of their container, throwing a major monkey wrench into test-driven development of these types of applications....http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/13_ioc.html Look Ma -- No Middleware! Using Event-Driven Architectures inside a JVM.- (Found July 2, 2008 ) Our most recent project was to replace a batch-oriented stored procedure with a more flexible, maintainable and scaleable Java-based architecture. We chose an event-driven architectural style that processes events as they occur. For the initial roll-out we did not even have to distribute the solution so it all runs in single JVM (if you ignore clustering for the moment). Read on to learn more about the implementation and our experiences with intra-JVM EDA.http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/14_edainjvm.html Indigo Design Preview- (Found July 2, 2008 ) I just attended the Indigo Strategic Design Review in Redmond. This means we got to interact with the product team and play with some pre-beta bits. Naturally, a lot of details are under NDA and are likely to evolve before the beta release. So here some rather general impressions -- I heard Internet connectivity in jail is really bad :-).http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/15_indigo.html |