SOA

One of my friends and mentors, Bill Vass, has consistently advised IT professionals to understand, respect and use the power of well formed IT architecture.  Bill has often reminded me and others that architecture is design.  If you have poor design, or if you have good design that is ignored, then the architecture is...
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Most enterprise technologists should see a continued payoff of the hard work in planning, architecture, documentation, development and configuration work that has been occurring over the last several years.  Enterprise technologists were building Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) long before SOA was over-hyped.  And most enterprise technologists I know were investigating constructs of scalable, elastic...
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Adobe Flex is a software development approach and environment which enables the production of cross-platform Rich Internet Applications.  Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is the cross-platform runtime environment used by Flex (as well as Flash, HTML, JavaScript and AJAX) for deployment of desktop applications. I’ve long known the power of Flex and AIR, and have long...
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Cloud Computing is one of the many things enterprise CIOs, CTOs and other engineers will master in delivering capability.  I believe in the power of new Cloud Computing technologies and concepts and think we should all continue our focus there. I have said, and still say, the same thing about design approaches like Service Oriented...
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“The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from” teaches Andrew S. Tanebaum in his classic text on Computer Networks. His point is so very important for CTOs to noodle over.  Every vendor, integrator and PM will tell you they are following standards.  GREAT!   But so what?  The point is...
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The term SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) has been around for quite a while, and it seems like everyone is using it.   But is everyone using it correctly?   I guess that is open to debate, but since everyone seems to be using it differently the odds are that enterprise CTOs will have to think through...
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The following is a review of some new capabilities at Google (these were all announced and discussed on the official Google blog): Better and faster route planning on maps.  Google maps now has dragable directions, and you can also enter guidance and info on Google maps like “avoid highways” or calculate “time-in-traffic”....
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Information Week just published a piece on Mashups.  They picked a really in-your-face title for this cover story, labeling it “Half-Baked or Mashed: Is Mixing Enterprise IT And The Internet A Recipe For Disaster?“  I guess in the world of tech reporting you need to use a little fear to get people to pick...
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I believe Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) should be good at IT (Interpreting and Translating). We should interpret and translate between technical experts and their languages and users and their languages. We shouldn’t expect every technical person to understand the full elegance of the broad missions we support, but they must grasp the essentials or their...
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James Connolly just wrote a nice piece on the challenges and rewards of Web 2.0 integration (see “Web 2.0 Integration…” ).    James interviewed me for the piece and I found him to not only be very professional but to have a really good knowledge of these new technologies.   He was also skilled at...
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