The primary mission of information technology is to improve business processes and increase profits. Companies are constantly rethinking and struggling with how to use IT to a competitive advantage, reduce IT operating and maintenance costs, and reduce the total cost of ownership... al...

The combination of portal technology, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and Web services provides customers with a powerful approach to developing, assembling, and deploying portal-based composite applications. Recent improvements in composite application development tools, coupled ...

Software reuse process and infrastructure are key enablers for SOA success. Software engineering spent the better part of the 20th century stubbornly resisting standard engineering disciplines. Project introspection and peripheral management activities accepted by all other engineering...

Companies that adopted and deployed early implementations of Web services primarily focused on three fundamental areas: These early implementations were driven by a need for greater efficiency in integrating systems, data and business processes, and in development.

People often assume that .NET and J2EE are locked in some kind of life and death struggle. In fact, they can co-exist very well as I proved on a recent project. Both .NET and J2EE are based on open standards; these are Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) and Simple Object Access Pr...

The recent explosive growth of transactional information and applications over the Web has led to a very real concern for IT managers - how to address the processing bottleneck in Web and application servers. For service-oriented architectures (SOAs) that use XML to bridge the transfer...

Web services have been touted as a really 'big thing' in the software industry the last couple of years, and that is for good reason: they promise technical interoperability between platforms from different vendors, an hitherto unheard-of thing in an industry plagued by proprietary non...

Web services have been touted as a really 'big thing' in the software industry the last couple of years, and for good reason: they promise technical interoperability between platforms from different vendors, an hitherto unheard-of thing in an industry plagued by proprietary non-compati...

More than ever, midsized businesses face the challenge of operating in a global economy, where nothing stands still. Product life cycles that once might have been measured in terms of years, are now measured in months or even weeks. From development to service, successful companies are...

Web services products have matured rapidly over the past 12 months, to the point where it's become acceptable to utilize the technology in major projects. However, though improving, the currently available toolkits can't be considered complete.

In the past decade 'workflow' has become one of the most overloaded terms in the software industry. Almost every application is tagged as 'based on workflow.' While this doesn't always mean a lot, there is good reason for it; it involves recognition among software architects that t...