Paul O'Connor

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 work on, a disturbing antipattern has emerged regarding application security design. It goes like this: the business declares a requirement for zero tolerance for security flaws (it is a catastrophic problem for one user to see another user's account, or HIPAA requires that no one see some data... (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 Will Kill the Offshore Model

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 de... (more)

En Masse SOA Enablement Methodology Distilled

I never quite fathomed the software development methodology craze that was gripping enterprise computing when I came onto the scene in the early '90s. In those days development teams were managing complexity and enforcing quality via draconian software development life cycles (SDLCs). A lot of big enterprises were using SDLCs that they had purchased as mindshare from system integrators or tool vendors. The ones people paid for came to be known as big-M methodologies, to denote their hegemony in the field. There was even a meta-process to measure how refined your methodology was.... (more)

SOA Product Review: Managed Methods JaxView 4.0

Whether you work for a very large company with thousands of services in production or a small company with only a couple, visibility into the performance and uptime of those services is critical. Before you start investigating the myriad of governance products on the market, many of which will set you back a great deal of money, let me save you some time (and money). You can get up and running in about an hour for chump change with JaxView from Managed Methods and get a firm handle on how your services are performing (or not performing as the case may be). If you’ve ever worked ... (more)