EAI Blog

   Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the last class meeting because I was on a trip out of the city. Now I will need to review the slides and the textbook and complete Lab 4 from home.   
   On Monday, April 7, our team submitted the first deliverable of our group project (Project Design document). We are looking forward towards working on the second deliverable - service setup, which is due by Thursday, April 24.
   During the past week, I was very busy and did not have time for working on converting my term paper to rpML format. I hope that on the weekend of April 12-13 I should have some time to work the paper conversion. However, most likely, I will spend most of the weekend studying for the midterm examination for BUS ADM 814 (Business Intelligence Systems) which is scheduled for next Wednesday. 

I completed my term paper in MS Word format.

Working on the paper was definitely an interesting, enjoyable, and rewarding activity. It was a good opportunity to conduct and independent research, to think, to analyze and evaluate the findings.

Actually, working on the term paper was among my favorite experiences at UWM together with the great business case studies in Professor Ramamurthy's classes.

I was even wondering if it would be beneficial to add student term paper presentations to the syllabus when the course is offered next time. It would allow students to familiarize themselves with the topics researched by peers and share their thoughts, ideas, and findings with the rest of the group.

I continue working on the Term Paper.
The more I read about ESB, the more I can see how controversial the topic is.  

People cannot agree on almost everything related to ESB.
For example, some people think that an ESB is not a product, but an architectural pattern.
Others, however, describe ESB as a coherent piece of infrastructure available for purchase through a number of vendors.

I believe that both notions are correct. ESB is definitely an architectural pattern with some distinctive features, but at the same time, it is a coherent piece of software and not just a composition of traditional middleware in a new packaging. 

I was also finally able to create a short homemade ESB definition based on the Dave Chappel's article: “ESB is a SOA-based Enterprise Application Integration Broker”. I think that the definition above gives a good idea of what ESB really does and what role it plays in the enterprise architecture.

   Lab 3b

   I have completed the second part of Lab 3. Everything seemed to be fine until I tried testing the whole configuration and received an error message saying that the Receiver Agreement was not found.

   I inspected the Receiver Agreement and did not find any errors in it. Then I compared it with the already existing agreements and eventually discovered that instead of being active, my Receiver Agreement was still in the "Being Processed" state.

   It turned out that although I was activating all the entities, some of them failed to activate which I did not notice because the errors were displayed in the very small window at the bottom of the screen.

  After I activated all the entities, the test started working properly and I was able to complete the lab.

   Term paper

   I started working on the term paper and found out that it was not so easy to find a good definition of the ESB. Most of the articles introduce the ESB just by describing its key features without giving any formal definition. Therefore, I had to perform some additional web search in order to find a clear, compact, and useful definition of the ESB.

   Surprisingly, most of the experts turned out to be not in favor of the ESB. Their thoughts were somewhat similar to those available in the interesting Steve Vinoski’s Blog entry.

   If I remember correctly they put the ESB in one row with the many failed attempts (like EJB, for example) to create a software "silver bullet" that will solve all the application integration problems.    As Steve notices in his blog "Many developers just want to write some code and plug it into a magical framework that transparently handles all the distribution, persistence, security, transactions, and reliability underneath. Chuckle. Underlying frameworks just grow and grow as they try to provide all this, and so they develop more bugs, more inconsistencies, more special cases, less flexibility, and less reliability as time goes on, not to mention foisting on the unwary the XML configuration hell..."

   Another their point was that the ESB is heavy utilized by software giants like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. trying to lure naive customers into a trap of an exclusive contract and make them heavily dependant on one particular vendor product.
   At first, it looked more like a  exaggeration to me. Just the following Monday, however,  I learned that Cape Clear, the ESB vendor that company where I work uses, was acquired by Workday. According to the article, Workday also mentioned that "the Cape Clear ESB will no longer be available as a standalone offering". The future of the ESB at my company has suddenly become uncertain.

   Another misconception mentioned in Steve's article is that "Large enterprises believe they can save themselves a lot of money and trouble if they can just get the whole enterprise to agree on a single integration architecture". In reality, states Steve, it never happens.

   Both Greater Wisconsin Software Symposium experts and Steve agree that in most of the cases dynamic languages and REST provide much better solution for lowering software development costs and achieving integration and extensibility than the ESB does.

   Well, this is definitely something to think about.

While working on the second reading assignment (John S. Webster, "Health Services," Computerworld, July 2005) I came across the familiar name of John Halamka - a controversial CIO of Boston-based CareGroup.

Apparently, John Halamka has recovered from the famous 2002 fiasco which is known to the public as "Beth Israel's Health-Care IT Disaster" and is considered to be one of the worst health-care IT disasters in the history of mankind. The detailed description of that case can be found in the excellent Harvard Business School study.

After reviewing the study, I came to conclusion that CareGroup’s senior IT management concentrated their efforts on the technology side of IT and paid too little attention to the actual IT management. The case clearly shows that even the latest and greatest IT solutions are not able to prevent system failure if they are not supplemented with proper management and governance.

It looks like Care Group IT, being very proud of the highest level of the implemented technology, did not have a solid disaster recovery plan or a reliable backup process. Security management, network planning, and change control processes did not seem to be of good quality either.

Now Halamka is very excited about “seamless data integration” and web services. In the Computerworld article he calls them “… the glue that you can use to create a virtual system”. However, he does not even mention the challenges of SOA Governance, which seems to be an alarming symptom to me. I hope that the Care Group IT avoids another disaster.

The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is becoming one of the important elements of Application Integration at my work. I have some practical experience in working with the ESB. All new web services that we develop are added to the Service Registry and are accessed by consumers through the ESB.

That is why I decided to pick "ESB" as a topic for my term paper. Specifically I am interested in how ESB is related to SOA and in how ESB solutions can be implemented in the organizations that use SOA.

I am looking forward towards participating in Greater Wisconsin Software Symposium that will last from Friday, February 29 until Sunday, March 2. It is also known as "No Fluff, Just Stuff" conference. 

I went to that conference two years ago and liked it a lot. The speakers were excellent, the topics were very interesting and informative, and the overall organization was great.

This year they again are offering many interesting sessions. I am particularly interested in Filthy Rich Clients with the Google Web Toolkit presented by David Geary because I am thinking about using GWT to develop a web site for the neighborhood where I live.

Another example of a very useful session is 10 Tips for Getting Your Project Back on Track  presented by Jared Richardson. After taking the excellent BUS 748 "Information Technology Project Management" course taught by Professor Ramamurthy I became very interested in Project Management and did not want to miss a chance to learn more about it.