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…

Continue Reading Add comment

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.

Continue Reading Add comment

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.

Continue Reading Add comment

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.

Continue Reading Add comment

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:

Continue Reading 7 comments

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.

Continue Reading Add comment

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 2 comments

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 3 comments

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