Paul O'Connor

The one thing that unifies the distributed computing style known as SOA, in most of its manifestations, is self-describing data via the Extensible Markup Language (XML). The benefits of XML over opaque message formats in data interchange are well established. No matter if your fo... (more)

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... (more)

Testing is a first-order constituent of SOA governance. Assuring that services and service infrastructure components meet functional and technical requirements across lifecycle stages and environments, including production, is an architectural precept in SOA. Gone are the days w... (more)

Many enterprises are currently reorganizing their people, processes, and technology around services. A few are holistically revamping their enterprise architectures around SOA and embarking on roadmaps to achieve grandiose business goals. Far more enterprises are trying to deal ... (more)

Part I of this series observed that 2006 was the year in which many large-scale SOA projects were kicked off in medium and large enterprises. Which means that an all-encompassing methodology that could evolve SOA to the enterprise was needed. Much has been written about service a... (more)

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 (SD... (more)

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 wor... (more)

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. Th... (more)

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 ... (more)