27 September 2015
Change in an API is inevitable. Attempting to manage this change through version numbering usually creates more problems than it solves.
2 July 2015
Gartner’s definition of enterprise integration as a service is so wide that it can be difficult to draw any meaningful comparisons between the platforms in the “leaders” space.
4 January 2015
REST is sometimes described as the next evolutionary step in service integration. The problem is that REST provides too much of a dumb pipe to support genuinely decoupled, fault-tolerant service integration.
16 December 2014
Azure Service Bus can provide first-in-first-out messaging in theory, but this is not the same as guaranteeing the order in which your messages are processed.
21 August 2014
When developers first start using messaging they can be tempted to use it as a brand new hammer for every nail. Messaging brings a lot to the party, but it isn’t necessarily a suitable transport for fast, synchronous query processing.
22 July 2014
Using version tolerant readers can help you to cope with changes to service contracts though this does come at the expense of a weaker contract. The approach is more appropriate for fluid services that are prone to frequent change.
16 July 2013
Change is an inevitable and even desirable part of distributed development. Managing the impact of that change is the difficult part, particularly when change affects the service interfaces that bind a distributed platform together.
4 June 2013
Sharing services and APIs can appeal to a desire to reduce duplication and improve development efficiency. It’s a worthy ambition though the journey there can be littered with costly traps for the unwary.
22 April 2013
Azure’s Brokered Message API provides a basic set of methods that make it easy to start sending and receiving messages through the Azure Service Bus. The problem is that it doesn’t do much to provide some of the basic scaffolding required by a serviceable messaging client.
22 February 2013
Shared databases risk turning into performance bottlenecks that encourage close-coupling and create a single point of failure. There’s no justification for using them to integrate processes and applications.