2007-10-14 Sunday

I recently offered to help an Open Source project - by contributing a set of BIRT reports to their code base - which would enable users to print out HTML, RTF, or PDF details of the contents of the system. The lead developer's response was essentially: that's a useless thing - when people can just go online and access the system. I offered counter examples of how/why this could be a useful addition to the tool's capabilities: distributed teams that may be restricted by corporate firewall policies - or security restrictions - that may not be able to access the system; working with multiple external vendors who do not (and should not) have privileges to access the company's internal system; teams that may prefer to work offline in a more relaxed environment (coffee shops?) - and discuss / review detailed print-outs at off site meetings; executive-level steering committee meetings - where the players generally prefer to have paper copies to work from and annotate notes. Try as I might - I could not budge that person one inch to accept the offered contribution.

As someone once said, "you can lead a horse to water...but you can't make them drink".

Then again, it could be a blatant (or latent?) prejudice - since BIRT is a Java based application - and the other tool is a PHP based application.

Eoin Woods (Enterprise Architect, UBS Bank): Top Ten Software Architecture Mistakes: Part-1, Part-2

Large Scale Software Architecture: A Practical Guide Using UML by Jeff Garland and Richard Anthony published by John Wiley & Sons

Carnegie Mellon® Software Engineering Institute (SEI): Software Architecture Essential Bookshelf

Establishing a Service Governance Organization

The ESB Question

This is an interesting wikipedia article: Technology Adoption Lifecycle



I'm a proponent of a mixed SOA model - using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for transactions that need a more powerful layer of infrastructure support (e.g. security, transaction controls, etc.)- but balancing that with services that can / should be implemented with a lighter architectural approach. This book has some good information to help teams balance their approach - and avoid the "everything must go through the bus" fatal performance approach that has plagued many organizations efforts to adopt SOA: RESTful Web Services

Getting grubby: Demystifying the Linux start-up processes

Boot loader showdown: Getting to know LILO and GRUB