Category SOA Business

SOA and Kitchen Renovation

November 12, 2011 SOA Business  No comments

We’re in the process of renovating our kitchen.  In our kitchen
design, we’re actually constructing a new structure to extend the
current kitchen. If any of you have gone through this, I’m sure you
have lots of war stories. But, as my wife and I go through this
process,  I keep seeing similarities between renovating a kitchen
and building a SOA.  To understand what I’m talking about, 
I’ll start by making some role comparisons:

Kitchen Renovation Roles	SOA Roles
Home Owner	Business Manager
Kitchen Designer	Business Analyst
Building Architect	SOA Architect
Construction Crew	Development Team

When renovating a kitchen there are usually four key roles; home owner,
kitchen designer, architect and construction crew. In SOA, there are
similar key roles; business manager, busi...

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Cool Java Persistence Code Generator

November 12, 2011 SOA Business  No comments

For all of you who are constantly writing and debugging your
persistence code, have I got a tool for you.

Check out Firestorm.

Firestorm can reverse engineer just about any database out there and
generate Core J2EE Pattern compliant DAO, 
JDO and Hibernate code. The
latest version even supports Dynamic Inserts.

Here’s a blurb from their web site:

“FireStorm/DAO adopts a pragmatic
approach of generating Java source
code for data persistence that is a direct mapping of a particular
relational database schema. It is also possible to define complex
multi-table queries and to leverage existing database logic contained
within stored procedures.”

This is a very cool tool.

Check it out!

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Rethinking your Business around SOA

November 12, 2011 SOA Business  No comments

I think companies are starting to see the amazing impact SOA can have
on their overall business value proposition.

Think about Amazon.com. Most people would say that Amazon.com is a site
to buy lots of products. In their mind,  Amazon.com’s website and
Amazon.com the company are the same. But, Amazon doesn’t appear to see
it that way….

As an Amazon outsider (which means I’m hypothesizing to make a point),
I bet it went something like this:

Amazon.com,
the beginning:
    \* Business Unit:
Leverage this thing called the Internet and create a website to sell
books to the world. Make tons of money. Build an easy-to-use website so
people of all ages can buy books. Track their buying patterns and let
them rate the books so others can see.

    \* IT: Ok, we
can build an awesome, intuitive web si...

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SOA Best Practice for Business Unit Alignment

November 12, 2011 SOA Business  No comments

Here’s probably the first best practice you should put into place when
building a SOA:

Build a SOA with the business unit!

Here’s what I mean. I keep seeing IT groups defining and building
a SOA without engaging the business unit. Who, by the way, is their
customer.  An example is an IT group building a SOA common
services infrastructure (management, registry, policy, etc) as a set of
services for the business unit to run their applications. But, they are
building it without the business unit. Which leads me to:

Build a SOA without the business
unit and watch them \*not\* come!

Seems so obvious, but it really isn’t. IT groups have grandiose
plans as to what infrastructure services they will provide and
build  without even really knowing what the business unit needs.
Why build 101 managemen...

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SOA, the Rock Star

November 12, 2011 SOA Business  No comments

Just finished the California leg of the U2 tour with Mary and Danny. That’s right, the U2
tour! Unbelievably, the  TED
prize granted Bono three wishes and we (Sun) are delivering on one of
the wishes. The wish is: Bono wants to
utilize technology to enlist his fans into his army against AIDS and
poverty.  You can check out the video on One.org

So, driven by Mary, with Danny as the technical lead, we
built a SMS solution for Bono to enlist his fans into the ONE Campaign during the Vertigo
tour. We built a really cool SOA infrastructure to support the SMS
solution. It’s made up of a series of loosely coupled services all
centered around consuming SMS messages and displaying the fan names on
the screen during the concert.

Below is a pix of the Sun team on stage with Bono and Brad Pitt durin...

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SOA Service Granularity

November 12, 2011 SOA Business  No comments

Interestingly, one of the most debated SOA architectural aspects 
(at least in architecture
and development teams) is the granularity
of a SOA Service. In the past year, I’ve tried a few different
strategies with customers and fellow architects to describe the
appropriate SOA service granularity. I started out saying “a SOA
service must be coarse grained”. “How large grained?”, many would ask.
“Very coarse grained”, I would answer. Then I would say; “definitely
not fine grained”.

As you can see, this is a pretty poor definition. So, I thought about
it and discussed it with Danny
Malks and tried to make it more SOA-like. So, I started talking
more about SOA services as  business services and
thus having business service
granularity. Sounds a bit subtle, but has a strong intent. As I
mentio...

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SOA is a Business-Driven Architectural Style

November 12, 2011 SOA Business  No comments

A few days ago, Dave Brillhart commented
on my earlier blog on the SOA Shift for aligning IT and the business
unit. This is a response/explanation to my thinking…

So what’s the big deal with making the business unit so prominent when
talking about SOA. It’s not about being one big happy family. 
It’s about the organizational structure which needs to support what we
really want to do; have
business drive the requirements for SOA. That’s what we mean when we
say SOA is a business-driven architecture, not a IT driven
architecture. 
If the business unit and the IT team don’t work together to achieve a
SOA, you will be very hard pressed to get the requirements necessary to
drive the proper service granularity and process definitions.

What does this really mean? It means that for SOA to be succe...

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My Most Important Cell Phone Feature

November 12, 2011 SOA Business  No comments

Gesture Muting

One of my favorite comics is the one where two dogs are sitting at the
computer and the tag line reads “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a
dog.”  But, I think we need a comic relevant to
“generation flex” who like the flexibility of working from anywhere and
doing conference calls at home, in the
car, on the treadmill, while feeding the kids, going to the bathroom
and even while changing poopie diapers. Not that I do any of these
;>, but I know others do. How? I can hear them. How can I hear them?
Because, today’s cell phone mute button technology sucks! That’s right,
let’s start innovating in the least addressed feature of the cell
phone; the mute button.

I have a nokia 82xx phone and it requires me to press a button, toggle
down to “mute” and then select it...

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SOA Shifts

November 12, 2011 SOA Business  No comments

SOA means a lot of things to a lot of people. And, now that the money
is flowing to SOA, even more of us are interested. The reality is that
SOA is much more than just a buzzword. It is an architectural style
which tends to be best realized using Web Service and open standards.
It’s not the only way to implement SOA, but sure does seem to be the
most popular lately.

We’re finding that there are some key “shifts” that have to take place
in an organization to be successful with SOA. Today, I’ll talk about
the first of these “SOA Shifts”.

• Shift #1 – SOA requires a combined effort between IT and the
  Business Unit

The point of this shift is that we cannot do SOA without a mutual
effort between IT and the BU. Gone are the days of throwing the
requirements over the fence and hoping it hits...

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My First Day at Blog School

November 12, 2011 SOA Business  No comments

Hi all, my name is John Crupi and I am the CTO of the Enterprise Web Service Practice at Sun Microsystems. And, this is my very first blog.

This is very timely because today, Sun just announced a great joint partnership between Sun, data.org and Bono from U2.

Press Release

This is turning out to be one of the most gratifying things I’ve done at Sun.

So, here are my interests which I’ll be blogging about in the future:

1. Patterns – Bringing patterns to the next level…

Core J2EE Patterns

2. SOA – Service Oriented Architecture isn’t just a buzz word, it really has potential to change the way we do integration (in an open standard way)…

3. Cool tech stuff – Things which make my life easier…

4. University of Maryland Terps – Big sports fan…

UM Terps

5...

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