Summa

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.  

Continue Reading Add comment

A few weekends ago my father and I were installing a shower valve in my soon-to-be new bathroom in my soon-to-be remodeled basement. This isn’t your father’s shower valve though; no, this is a new-fangled shower valve. You are all familiar with shower valves (I hope), they come in two varieties mostly: 1. two knobs…one hot, one cold. 2. One lever/knob that gradually goes from cold to hot. I could go into much more detail on how this works now that I am a plumbing master, but that’s for another blog and another time.

So on with the story. We are installing this valve I bought without really inspecting at the store (I figured a shower valve is a shower valve right? The most important thing is that my wife likes the color), and it is the lever type that mixes hot and cold as you move it left to right. However, we notice that while this controls the temperature mix of the water it does not actually allow water to flow through the valve. That is controlled by another lever attached to the valve.

Continue Reading Add comment

You might have noticed how hard it is to obtain your own health care history. Most medical records are written on paper. This is changing, but slowly. Even forward-looking doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies who are converting to electronic records have a hard time integrating with each other, since each IT system is largely independent of other systems. What you, the patient, would like to see is all of your history together in one place, regardless of who the provider was or where the care was given.

Continue Reading 1 comment

Summa architects often find that we are smoke-jumping late into failing projects to fire-fight failing business critical web and enterprise applications. Often the failures are a direct result of a road laid by best intentions (and limited budgets). Here is my top five list of enterprise application architecture fallacies that result in significant failures. Each fallacy could stand a lot more discussion - but let’s start with some thought-provoking ideas:

Continue Reading Add comment

XML Schema Definition (XSD) files define the structure and data types used in XML messages. XML schemas are a must-have in any application that relies on the use of XML. XML Schemas have become the universal definition language for integrating systems, as well as for defining common formats used for data interchange. Although there is not a “one size fits all” standard for creating schemas, it is essential to define XML Schema standards within IT organizations in order to ensure XML schemas can be easily reused, maintained and extended while minimizing impact on existing integrations. Without best practices and naming conventions, a project can end up with inconsistent schemas that may be too rigid or too relaxed to meet project requirements. On this blog post, I will go over ten practical tips for designing and building reusable XML Schemas. These recommendations can be used as a starting point for defining XML Schema standards within your organization.

Continue Reading 2 comments

In our first post about whether or not an organization should consider building an iPhone application, we were walking through a series of questions:

• Why is my application a fit?
• Why now?
• How hard is it?
• What should I worry about?
• How do I get started?

Let’s pick up with “How hard is it”? If you want to reread about the first 2 questions - just jump back to the first part in the series.

Continue Reading Add comment

So - do you remember where you were on June 29, 2007? You probably didn’t realize it - but the world changed that day. No - this was no 9/11 type incident or Moon landing, this was the introduction of the first generation iPhone. With over 2 billion application downloads later, the iPhone has changed the way mobile computing is perceived and has forced its competitors to dramatically upgrade their product offerings to compete. There is so much momentum in mobile computing now, things will never be the same. But - that’s a good thing!

Continue Reading 1 comment

Your team has designed the perfect architecture for an SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) project. You are all excited and ready to get rolling. A few weeks later you find out that you will need to make several compromises in your design because of other teams’ skills and constraints. Your end of the integration is almost fully developed and ready for integration testing when you find out that the other end is still undergoing development, or worse, it is in still on early stages of design. Sound familiar? I have found these to be very common situations in SOA integration projects that span across two or more teams and/or applications. In this post I will explore five frequent SOA project pitfalls along with some recommendations that can help mitigate or avoid some of these roadblocks to make your project successful. You will find that these scenarios are not unique to SOA integration projects, but they also apply to most inter-group IT projects.

Continue Reading 3 comments

Welcome to the kickoff of Developing iPhone Applications, a series of blogs aimed at helping programmer, engineers, and architects coming from a Java/C# background to create rich, interactive applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Leveraging Summa’s experience and past projects, we are going to create blog entries on a variety of topics.

Continue Reading Add comment

There’s plenty of talk about security and SOA (or should I just say services now?), but the vast majority seems to cover only the issues of authentication and identity management, and neglects the equally important problem of authorization (*1). Although I can’t claim to be a security expert, in a series of posts, I’d like to share some of my thoughts and experiences on implementing authorization in the world of service-oriented architectures.

In this first post, I’d like to take a quick trip through some of the basic terms and definitions of authorization, laying the conceptual groundwork for the later posts. Ok, let’s get started!

Continue Reading Add comment

Planning for application modernization projects frequently stalls because decision makers are frozen in their tracks by uncertainty around the wide range of options and approaches to replacing, improving, rehab’ing or reusing a legacy system. Build versus buy; go fast versus go slow; good versus cheap; user impact; technologies to use (and not use); level of reuse of legacy “stuff”; historical data access; data quality and IT skills are just a few of the considerations that boggle architecture decisions and confound planners. This article outlines some of the metaphors and patterns that have been useful to break the gridlock.

Continue Reading Add comment

When software developers and architects select open source software over commercial alternatives, there is often a premise that because the software is free, (as in beer vs. speech) there is zero cost associated with the choice. This post describes considerations and provides linked studies that provide help in clarifying how TCO may be used in the decision process.

Continue Reading 3 comments

There is a lot of talk these days about 100% test coverage and if we should strive to reach it. I honestly think that 100% test coverage is a hot topic because it can be easily measured.

To me the most important question is how much test coverage is enough.

I would like to discuss test coverage by making an analogy with exercise.
We all know that exercising, like testing, is a good thing. We also know that there is a range that dictates the minimum and maximum amount of exercise that will be beneficial. Too little exercise and nothing happens, too much and it can hurt and even cause permanent damage.
How much exercise is enough? Will I be healthy if I start running some miles every week? Probably yes. Would I be even healthier if I (try) to run 1000 miles every week? Most likely not.

It is the same thing with testing. Can I definitely say that a product with 60% test coverage is “healthier” than a product with 1%? Not definitely, but plausibly yes, to the point that I can bet on it, and I’m not a gambler. How about a product with 40% and one with 50% test coverage? From a “healthy” perspective it is hard to assume that one is better than the other by looking only at the coverage. (A theme for another post would be to discuss if High Test Coverage is a cause or consequence of the fitness of a product).

Continue Reading 10 comments

In the early days of SOA many new products arrived on the scene that seemed to be solutions looking for a problem. As the SOA space matures (or maybe matured, since some have claimed it is dead*), so do the products and the relevant architectural patterns that use those products. However, there are other areas of SOA where you find solutions looking for a problem - the services themselves.

Continue Reading Add comment

When Voltaire wrote, “The perfect is the enemy of the good”, I strongly suspect that he did not have software design and development projects in mind. But he may well have in mind had one of problems that software development projects of often suffer: elegance creep. When is “good enough” actually better than perfect? What can architects, project managers and business stakeholders do to recognize and address elegance creep?

Continue Reading 1 comment