I call my collection of blog entries "ramblings" because they are based on my personal opinions and observations as opposed to official "articles". The topics cover a variety of topics, ranging from integration, messaging, and conversation patterns to enterprise architects and architecture, events I spoke at as well as patterns and writing.
My blog posts related to IT strategy, enterprise architecture, digital transformation, and cloud have moved to a new home: ArchitectElevator.com.
These are my Ramblings on WebServices. See all Ramblings.
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As indicated a good while ago I spent some time thinking about patterns that instead of following a message through multiple systems, looks at the message exchange over time between a (mostly) fixed set of systems. I call these message exchanges "conversations". Sadly my writing efforts on Conversation Patterns fell very much asleep around 2008, partly due to my fear that with the rise of REST, stateful conversations between systems would step into the background as most integration problems are now solved with a simple POST or GET. A presentation and conversation at Frank Leymann's IaaS PhD Seminar enlightened me that this is not at all true: systems following the REST architectural style very much engage in conversations. Read more »
Beginning of this year I submitted an article to a renowned software publication who is running a special issue on software patterns. Sadly, my article did not make it into the magazine but I decided to publish an expanded version on my site. Hey, I got to make it worth your time following my ramblings! Am I bitter that my article was rejected? Not at all, but if I ever get a hold of these #^%#$& -bleep- of a -bleep- I'll... Read more »
I just returned from a trip to Germany to attend a workshop on The Role of Business Processes in Service Oriented Architecture. Besides a guaranteed top score in buzzword bingo the workshop provided a unique opportunity to connect thought leaders from academia and industry over the course of a week. The attendee roster sported the usual industry heavyweights, i.e., Microsoft, IBM, SAP, making me proud to add Google to the list. Read more »
On a recent project we developed a Web services framework that supports asynchronous callbacks and asynchronous invocation with polling. The difficulties we had describing what we were trying to do to my fellow ThoughtWorkers on other projects prompted me to discuss the different forms of asynchrony in a little more detail. Read more »
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.... Read more »