Paul O'Connor

I know what you're thinking: SOA hype has reached an absurd level and now someone is literally proclaiming that it will change the world - but bear with me for a minute. Anyone who has been around corporate IT for the last five years or so has seen an avalanche of development work sent offshore for two primary reasons: cheaper unit labor cost and the flat-out inability to find qualified American developers. Also, the mainstay system development model whereby business units built up app silos, which served to minimize reuse and increase integration complexity, demanded a way to deal with the cost of its own inefficiency. Offshoring was perfect - you could justify using twice as many developers as necessary when they cost one third as much. The trend hasn't been just limited to corporate IT either. Offshore workers are handling many other business functions, though t... (more)

SOA World Product Review: iTKO LISA 4 SOA Testing

Testing is a first-order constituent of SOA governance. Assuring that services and service infrastructure components meet functional and technical requirements across lifecycle stages and environments, including production, is an architectural precept in SOA. Gone are the days when testing was an isolated hop in the old disjointed SDLC. You know the one I'm talking about - an architect would design a component, hand it to developers to develop and they would hand it to testers to test, and testers, in turn, who would hand it to system administrators to operate. The components we... (more)

Solve Your Application Security Issues

I'm sure I'm like many of you in this respect: I got into engineering because I love the idea of being able to address complex problems with a combination of my talent, my friends' talent, and the tools that I can come up with to make our work as easy as possible (work smart not hard!). It is this approach that has guided me in my work as an application and technical architect. I come to work every day looking for that "wow" feeling that comes when I realize that another problem that seemed intractable has been solved. But in the pantheon of hard problems that beset projects I wo... (more)

Eight Things SOA Is Not; What Not To Do In Your Next SOA Web Services Rollout

Sometimes when we're faced with addressing a complex engineering problem it's helpful to reflect on antipatterns. Doing so does more than track wrong solutions to common problems; it also focuses the mind on the interaction of the most important elements of the problem domain. This is true for all engineering, not just software engineering. Suspension bridge designers know to be on the lookout for torsional oscillations because of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, but they also better understand the importance of stiffening the structure in general. The goal is to limit ... (more)

SOA Software Service Manager 5.0 + Workbench 5.0 Product Review

Many enterprises are currently reorganizing their people, processes, and technology around services. A few are holistically revamping their enterprise architectures around SOA and embarking on roadmaps to achieve grandiose business goals. Far more enterprises are trying to deal with the unexpected emergence of services and service integration requirements resulting from platform upgrades, portal mashups, ESBs, and service-oriented business requirements such as external partner federation. No matter how they come to SOA, enterprises quickly realize that they need to manage and go... (more)