The Enterprise Cloud Requires a real time infrastructure and a management discipline that understands and can enforce service level discipline.

Disclaimer, warning, be advised, heads up, disclosure, this post is partially for fun so take it that way. Remember ILM, that is, Information Lifecycle Management among other meanings. It was a popular buzzword de jour a few years ago similar to how cloud is being tossed around lately,...

Is SOA dead? This question keeps popping up every now and then within the IT community and though we all seem to agree that SOA is far from dead something has indeed radically changed: our expectations. Just a few years ago, perhaps months, we considered SOA to be the solution to all ...

Over the past two years, governments around the world have caught the enterprise architecture and SOA fever. This is especially the case in the US Federal Government, where a number of regulations, EA frameworks, and major spending initiatives are all pointing towards continued and las...

There’s nothing more that architects love to do than argue about definitions. If you ever find yourself with idle time in a room of architects, try asking for a definition of “Service” or “architecture” and see what sort of creative melee you can start. That being said, definitions are...

Thank you to everyone who took the time to share a wide range of views in response to yesterday's post in its comments, on Twitter, and out on your own blogs. Although reduced to silence throughout the day because of other commitments, I have been reading and learning from all of you. ...

According to a recent market study by Datamonitor, the current global economic recession may also prove to be a significant driver for Green Computing. Their market assessment raises lots of questions -- including, is it better for the world, and overall business profitability, if exec...

Ever since ZapThink coined the term "Service Oriented Integration" (SOI) back in 2002, there's been unceasing confusion on just how Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and integration relate to one another. Several recent blog posts have refocused attention on this confusion, including...

Without availability scalability is irrelevant

I really enjoyed Jeff Atwood’s recent blog on Scaling Up vs Scaling Out

Busy day for cloud interoperability related news. Google just announced a new service called Google Wave, described as an open communication and collaboration platform & protocol based on hosted XML documents (called waves) supporting concurrent modifications and low-latency updates. I...

A more interesting question is 'Is XML on the web trending up or trending down?' Clearly, it is trending down. For data transfer applications, XML is losing ground to JSON because JSON is simply a better data transfer format. And XHTML has failed to displace HTML in the marketplace. Th...

XML is a simple, flexible text format initially designed for large-scale electronic publishing. It is flexible, open, and human-readable, and can be learned easily. XML can also be generated, parsed, analyzed, and transformed easily. It's no wonder that XML has been widely used for ser...

Since the horrific events of September 11, 2001, the federal government has intensified its efforts to improve communications, collaboration, and information sharing between government and private sector agencies at all levels. The task of creating a seamless system of data and communi...

In this article I am going to introduce you to the latest version of the Berkeley DB XML, version 2.2.8. Berkeley DB XML (BDB XML) is built on top of the well-known Berkeley Database (BDB). BDB XML is an open source, native XML database. Like its ancestor, BDB, it's an embedded databas...

Imagine a fresh business relationship between ACME Corporation and Partner. As a result of this relationship, ACME wants to grant Partner limited access to one of its core internal applications. They do this, naturally, by exposing a Web service.

The Semantic Web is a hot topic in information circles today, and its adoption will largely depend on stakeholders understanding its potential benefits and tools vendors providing an easy entry for developers to learn and work with its related technologies.

The Department of Defense (DoD) Discovery Metadata Specification (DDMS) describes the DOD's preferred approach for decorating data assets with metadata. By providing a common convention for metadata, the DoD is building a common system for asset discovery, search, description, consumpt...

Before the information age, car manufacturers only made cars, libraries only stored books, and newspapers only printed the news. Now, however, companies from all industries are realizing that in addition to what they do, they are also publishers, and there is a learning curve.

Web services will continue to play a vital role within enterprises, as companies strive to create cost-effective solutions that can be integrated into existing infrastructures. J2EE and Microsoft's .NET are the two primary platforms used in Web services. And while these two platforms c...

The Web has become the world's greatest repository of information on anything and everything. It's extremely useful - as long as you can find what you're looking for. Despite the arrival of Google and other powerful search tools, information seekers can't always connect with the most r...

Despite a shortage of sophisticated XML query tools, Internet demands have forced companies to present their data in various formats. In one sense little has changed, as SQL queries have long been used to combine data for different purposes and audiences.

A few years ago there was no indication that XML could play an important role in computer-based process control. However, fast development and the spread of XML to different fields, and emerging trends in the field of automation, have changed the situation tremendously.

The end of the year is here again, a time when we traditionally take a long look at the progress we've already made and then turn our eyes toward the future, attempting to forecast the year to come.

Web services provide a way to allow efficient communication between disparate services. For years, enterprises have struggled to find reliable, cost-effective ways to integrate and automate critical processes between different application packages.

As XML has grown more prevalent as a data delivery mechanism, so too has the need to use it for presentation in a wide variety of reporting formats. XML is useful for more than just the delivery of information, however.

It occurs to me that my choice of title for this guest editorial may be at least partially influenced by the recall-induced elections in California (can you see the Arnie connection?). But this column is not about politics; it's about a new, industry-standard ecosystem built around XML...

This column may require a little patience on your part, but I think it will be worth it in the end. Let's start with a simple premise: within a year, nearly everyone reading these words will be deeply impacted by Sarbanes-Oxley, yet many have never heard of it.

When we at Antarctica start talking to a potential customer or partner, they say, 'That's Tim Bray's company? So this is XML-based data visualization?' And we have to say, 'No, it's ordinary database visualization. But because it's modern software, there's a lot of XML in the plumb...

In these cynical, post-bubble times, most chief information officers are rightfully dismissive about new technologies that promise to boost efficiency or customer service...but once in a while the claims are very true. Stylesheets can make application development cheaper and faster whi...

I've been focused on defining product strategy for business integration software for the past seven years. During that time I've watched XML go from being a fledgling document standard with lots of potential to a core technology that is critical for business integration. In this articl...

In the history of XML to date, its role in application development has been mostly on the edge - it has been used primarily as the format for applications to communicate with each other, as a way to serialize data or configuration information, or for some other use at the 'front door' ...

The incompatibility of today's proprietary file formats goes well beyond the inconvenience of, say, unreadable e-mail attachments. It raises the larger issue of ownership - and cost of ownership. The data in your spreadsheet, the content in your business presentation, the words in your...

I'm frequently asked about the difference between portability and interoperability, and am often surprised at how many people refer to one when they mean the other. On the surface, the terms are pretty understandable: interoperability means that different systems will work together.

A few years ago at an early XML conference, an attendee made the point that XML was such a useful technology for data portability that it would eventually become ubiquitous - part of every tool, server, and application. He went on to predict that XML would become so commonplace that t...

The hardest part of writing transactional Web applications is finding a way to produce dynamic pages. The main underlying component of these pages, HTML forms, was added to what was originally a static, document-based standard, to allow the simple exchange of data between the user and ...

Do you want to understand our industry? Forget the big-name industry pundits and think-tanks. Look to the great poets like Donne and Shakespeare. You can't go wrong. The great poets can provide a long-term, human perspective on how we think, dream, and scheme. That insight is useful ev...

The challenge of integrating software and systems will always be with us. In the brief but turbulent history of information technology, creation and destruction go hand in hand. Old technologies and approaches give way to new ones, sometimes quietly and sometimes with a fight. Yet, in ...

No standards movement in the history of the software industry has garnered as much attention or support as Web services. After the previous decade's failed attempts to reach unity, the industry has lauded the promise of more flexible, open, and interoperable software as a revolution an...

Better known in the i-technology world as enterprise application integration (EAI), B2B integration, or middleware, integration involves connecting internal systems with external business partners, customers, and suppliers. Integrating systems running on heterogeneous platforms, typica...

Questions about Web services and their uptake in financial services create a very black/white answer set. Some claim there's no usage; others say critical mass has been reached. The answer is somewhere in the middle.