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.
5 May 2015
Large scale rewrites of systems are loaded with risk. You can address this by preparing the ground in advance and adopting an incremental approach, but a willingness to be pragmatic is essential.
9 March 2015
We know that micro services are small and focused by design – just how small is this in practice?
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.
9 July 2014
An architecture based on tiers or layers is too inflexible to deal with the more flexible demands of modern systems, particularly when you working with high-volume systems that require distributed processing.
12 June 2014
There’s nothing really new about many of the ideas that underpin microservices. Are they just an agile re-branding of SOA?
4 May 2014
Developers who have been brought up on the certainties of ACID transactions often have a problem trusting eventual consistency. Once you start exploring the requirements in more depth this really so much of a handicap.
21 April 2014
Structured and Hackable URIs are a staple part of SEO-friendly websites. Although developers generically expect to see them in HTTP-based APIs, they should be irrelevant to consumers of a fully RESTful API that leverages HATEOAS.
12 March 2014
Agile principals encourage self-organising teams to take ownership of solutions. This doesn’t leave architects out in the cold, but it does require a more engaged role based on influence rather than governance.
21 February 2014
Deferring decisions to the “last responsible moment” can help you to adapt to the inevitable uncertainty that comes with agile development. The risk is that it can become an excuse for uncertainty that undermines development velocity.
19 October 2013
Given how important APIs have become in driving the reach of applications and services, it’s surprising how little investment is made in the usability of APIs as opposed to UIs. Perhaps the principals and techniques used by UX should be applied to developing more effective APIs…
23 September 2013
The promise of garbage collection can lull .Net developers into a false sense of security. They are still vulnerable to memory leaks and have a responsibility to keep an eye on what’s going on under the hood.
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.
17 June 2013
Netflix have closed their OData catalogue and EBay seem to have quietly put their implementation out to grass. With a shrinking ecosystem and no marquee services, does Microsoft’s data standard have a future?