The operations of many large organizations rest on large applications that
are characterized as "legacy." To increase flexibility or reduce costs
businesses are looking to modernize these applications, for instance, via
renovation, introducing an SOA architecture, or even re-implementing in a new
environment. No matter which approach is taken, it's important to salvage as
much knowledge and logic as possible from the legacy application. Unless the
application's function is obsolete recovering functional knowledge (what does
the application do?) and structural knowledge (how does ... (more)
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a business agility strategy. Repeat
after me: Business. Agility. Strategy. There are so many technology-focused
definitions of SOA floating around that it's difficult to remember that
simple fact.
SOA is focused on recognizing, precisely defining, storing,
retrieving/reusing and optimizing business processes, both automated ones and
human ones. If ... (more)
A Capsule History of Active Webs
The runaway success of the Web's HTML display language made everyone in the
software community stop and take note. What was so exciting about this new
technology? Was it the markup language itself? Couldn't be! HTML is just a
stripped down version (DTD) of SGML, which has been around for a while. Was
it the concept of a remote screen interface language? No,... (more)
One of the most delightful parts of my job is to travel the world, sharing
the Object Management Group's vision of integrated, interoperable systems
with varying sizes of audience from as few as 10 people to as many as
10,000 in every corner of the planet.
While the travel can sometimes be grueling, it's worth it when I get a
question or two after a speech that shows that someone has ... (more)