Much watched: The hardware side of the Oracle-Sun deal

It is much watched as Sun is absorbed into Oracle. We refer to the hardware side of the story. Will Larry Ellison follow through on his stated intention to hold on to Sun’s hardware business? Some viewers suggest his original interest was solely in Sun’s software. Recent news that Sun is jettisoning its advanced Rock processor program, presumably at Oracle’s bidding,  does not indicate an aversion to hardware on Oracle’s part – but it does not betoken a forward looking hardware program either. There are a couple of ways one can look at this. For a good view, read writer Ed Scannell’s How will Oracle do when the chips are down?

Garnter’s Blechar on BPM, MDM and SOA

There has been much talk about coordinating BPM and SOA. Now, add MDM to the mix. In a blog entry, Gartner’s Michael Blechar discusses a new report on the role Master Data Management plays in creating reusable, sharable data services. Continued »

UML to make way for AML?

Will UML make way for AML? Neal Ford sings the song of the Arbitrary Modeling Language (AML) in a post that cleverly recounts UML’s well-known shortcomings. We’d bet you could more than one of the original UML Three Amigos to give it a heavy crit too.. Continued »

JMS message system at heart of Portland Fish Exchange update

Business process management can get gory! At least that is the case when a fish exchange looks to automate parts of its supply chain processes. Recently, the Portland Fish Exchange in Maine built an online fresh seafood auction system based on Progress technology. Progress Application Partner DC Systems helped implement a bar-code-based approach. Continued »

IBM Sabbah’s say on REST for collaborative ALM

Let’s face it, services in general, and RESTful services in particular often can incur a performance penalty. Sometimes the benefits of the REST approach outweigh the drawbacks. But it is something to study. That is just one of many reasons why the architects charged with overseeing use of services have to be especially well-trained and experienced. Vendors in the rush to the market sometimes gloss over the details. We got a bit of a look behind the use of REST in an important IBM Rational program that represents a re-architecting of its Jazz Application Life-Cycle (ALM) software suited. Continued »

RedHat JBoss middleware group moves to improve Spring, GWT support

The varieties of Java frameworks and component architectures have expanded greatly since the days when the JBoss application server arose as an open-source alternative to commercial J2EE engines. Now the major JBoss steward is responding. Continued »

Enterprise mashups poised to power app dev for masses?

The PC revolution was not IT’s doing. Adventurous end-users brought the damn things into the company, impressed most everyone, and IT finally got with the program. Back in the day, with PC tools, mere mortals (end users) could learn programming too. They only did it because they got tired of waiting in an endless line to get a new application. Are we entering such an era yet again as enterprise mashups grow? Continued »

Transaction processing in the 21st Century

Eric Newcomer has just finished co-authoring the second edition of his book on transaction processing. On his blog, he discusses same lessons learned. The first edition was published in 1997, so much, but not everything has changed. Read ”What we Learned Writing the Second Edition of the TP Book.”

He sees a dichotomy in this field..

Fascinating to me are the different assumptions people make in the different worlds between the REST/HTTP “scale out” designs and the mainframe-derived “scale up” designs. This is likely to remain an area of continual evolution.

Oddly, or ironically, SearchSOA.com just ran a piece rolling up some various transaction monitoring events. Read ”End-to-end testing for SOA and enterprise transactions, or Show me the transactions.”

Parasoft SOA package addresses business process/system integration testing

Application Life Cycle specialist Parasoft moved recently to expand coverage of critical aspects of complex transactions extending – using the company’s terms -  “through web interfaces, backend services, ESBs, databases, and everything in between.” The result is a considerable update to Parasoft’s SOA Quality Solution line. Continued »

Red Hat builds on Drools

Red Hat continues its move up the middleware stack, improving its basic rules engine, and launching rules authoring tools to open the doors of rules development to business analysts. JBoss Rules builds on open-source Drools.

The new release is said to include new tooling that makes it easier for business side folks to program rules.

How far can easy rules making go, when do the business people have to go to the Java heads to really make things happen? What do you think?