Summa

In a previous post, I laid some of the conceptual groundwork for authorization in the tricky world of SOA. Now, a year older and a year wiser (I hope!), I’d like to swing back around to the topic of authorization, but broaden the scope a bit - talking not just about authorization and SOA, but about authorization and the whole enterprise “ecosystem” (services, applications, user interfaces, etc.).

In this post I’d like to describe the decentralized, “every man for themselves” model of authorization that is most common in organizations, and the problems inherent. In later posts I hope to touch on some possible paths out of this chaos - the XACML standard, the model of pre-determined access control, and attribute services. Here goes…

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Problem: Application began spewing out the following error when clicking on our Ajax-ified radio buttons:

java.lang.LinkageError: loader constraint violation in interface itable initialization: when resolving method "org.ajax4jsf.org.w3c.tidy.DOMNodeImpl.setUserData(Ljava/lang/String;Ljava/lang/Object; Lorg/w3c/dom/UserDataHandler;)Ljava/lang/Object;" the class loader (instance of com/ibm/ws/classloader/CompoundClassLoader) of the current class, org/ajax4jsf/org/w3c/tidy/DOMNodeImpl, and the class loader (instance of ) for interface org/w3c/dom/Node have different Class objects for the type

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Every once in a while, I’ll talk with somebody who’s confused about hashed passwords and the notion of cryptographic salt; what it is, and why you use it.  It’s really a simple idea that greatly enhances password security.  For those that are curious, here’s a 100,000 foot overview that glosses over many of the details but will give you the general idea.

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Integrating with SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions is often underestimated in complexity and effort. This white paper covers key planning considerations related to data modeling, data mapping and security, as well as key capabilities needed in a SaaS integration layer.

The “Planning for SaaS Integration” white paper is now available for dowload at our website (simple registration required).

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In Part 1 of this series of articles, I described the landscape of online Personal Health Records (PHR) and how they might benefit both the patient and the health care provider. In this article, I’ll dive into the feature set of one of the most prominent PHR implementations: Google Health. In Part 3 of the series, I’ll walk you through one approach to integrating Google Health into the SOA of a healthcare provider, using the BPEL engine provided in IBM WebSphere Process Server.

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We have all been in projects where we use a combination of open source libraries, for different components of our architecture. We know theoretically that it should work, but alas, something blows up at runtime. If we’re lucky, we experience this on a weekly basis, but we don’t get lucky that often. The “Conundrum Solved” series will tackle some of these hair-pulling, sleep-depriving, grouch-inducing problems some of us at Summa have encountered in our projects. We hope that by sharing them with you, you’ll keep your hair, get enough sleep, and maintain a smile on your face!

Problem: Invalidly getting an InvalidStateObjectStateException thrown upon calling  merge(), even if there were no updates to the entity.

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Summa was recognized by IBM as a finalist for the Smart SOA award during the Business Partner Summit at Impact – IBM’s annual SOA Conference – in Las Vegas last week.  

 IBM’s award program showcases business partners who have demonstrated excellence in delivering business value solutions to customers based on their integrations with IBM WebSphere software.  The SOA Award recognizes the best SOA based solutions that help customers create sustainable differentiation, achieve agility and realize business value.

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To maximize their benefit, SaaS solutions need to integrate with existing enterprise systems. Depending on the business requirements and the integration capabilities of the chosen SaaS product, the integration approach may not be trivial. While a comprehensive API offered by SaaS is a must-have, in most cases a custom SaaS integration layer will be needed to comply with SOA principles and to facilitate integration with existing systems.

In this blog post I will provide an overview of capabilities that a typical SaaS integration layer should provide, and identify integration products that best fit those capabilities.

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On Monday at IBM’s Impact conference, they announced their acquisition of Cast Iron Systems. This is a very interesting acquisition related cloud/SaaS integration and our Focus there. We will be following this closely in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned for more information.

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The following blog post is written for any developer who has experienced working on a web based application, and during such project, altered the front end code (css, html, jsp, xhtml, aspx, php, etc.)…

After consulting as a UI developer on a range of web applications, I’ve run into many different coding behaviors/standards. These projects range from annoyingly brittle to flexible and well designed. Yet, in every single one of these web projects, I found a troubling coding “pattern” that would eventually lead to maintenance headaches. What is this horrible “pattern” you ask? It is… (drum roll) the prevalent usage of inline styling (CSS)… ugh.

I can already imagine some developers scoffing (laughing?) at the idea that inline styling could be “troubling”. Well, let me stop and boldly say… it is bad practice that will ultimately hurt a project in the long run.

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Summa is a sponsor of IBM’s premiere SOA conference, IMPACT 2010, being held at the Venetian Resort Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas from May 2 through May 7, 2010. We will be presenting five sessions at the conference, along with a “Birds of a Feather” Breakout Session focused on “The Transformative Role of IT in Healthcare.”  The sessions include:

• UPMC Modernizes Healthcare Interoperability with WebSphere Process Server (Session ID: TIH-1218A)
  
• Highmark Modernizes Healthcare Insurance Sales Process with WebSphere Message Broker (Session ID: TCE-2182A)
  
• The Real TCO of WAS vs. JBoss and other Open Source JEE Runtimes (Session ID: TDW-2420A)
  
• Accelerate Your Cloud CRM Deployments with WebSphere (Session ID: TCE-1477A)
  
• Panel Discussion: WAS vs. JBoss and Tomcat: Customer Insights and Perspectives (Session ID: TDW-2671A)

If you are going to Impact 2010, stop by the Summa booth # IZ16 in the Industry Zone.  We are  highlighting solutions in Healthcare, SaaS/Cloud Integration, Application Modernization, and SOA, BPM, CRM and Connectivity.

For more information and more details about Summa’s sessions and the IMPACT 2010 conference, visit http://www.summa-tech.com/news/impact2010.php4.

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In a recent project the interface designer in my team asked whether we could disable the anchor tag (for expand/collapse) on the disclosure panel header and have a single button do the job, helping the user with a hint that this panel is actually expandable. I said OK, let’s see the DisclosurePanel javadoc. Suprise! All you can do is have a header and that itself is surrounded by the clickable anchor… time to extend Composite!

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It’s very tempting, given the power and ease of GWT, to jump in head-first and start building flashy new RIA applications for your customers right away. Slow down! Although I’m not generally an advocate of big design up front (BDUF), there are a few usability requirements that I think you’ll want to understand before you start coding – requirements that will fundamentally shape how you design your client-side GWT architecture, and therefore minimize re-work later.

So, toward the goal of evoking usability requirements, here are 6 important questions to ask your users or business owners:

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In this blog post I will provide an overview of considerations when integrating with a specific SaaS provider: Salesforce.com (SFDC). Salesforce.com is one of the most popular SaaS applications in the market and it is one the leading SFA (Sales Force Automation) solutions available to date. Salesforce.com provides very comprehensive integration capabilities. To narrow the scope of this post, I will focus on integrating through their Enterprise Web Service API. The discussion will also be focused on the technical aspects of the integration. There are several business and data modeling decisions that will not be covered here, but are covered at a high-level on an earlier post of this series.

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There are many things to consider when integrating with Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, some of which are easily overlooked. In many aspects, integrating with SaaS is similar to integrating with packaged products, but it is often more challenging due to the intricacies of integrating with a system hosted outside your network. In this blog post, I will go over some key planning considerations to be made in terms of data modeling, mapping, security, integration strategies and data cleansing among others.  

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