Latest News from Michael Poulin

Resolving RIA-SOA Conflict

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:00:00 EST

From the first days of Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology, many enthusiasts found an analogy between RIA and service-oriented architecture (SOA). Some of them talked about the benefits of a would-be-wonderful use of SOA in RIA; others saw RIA as a SOA face. Nonetheless, there are experts who see a discrepancy between RIA and SOA concepts.

Logging for SOA

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:00:00 EDT

What could be a problem with logging in SOA in the presence of such wonderful tools like log4j, Java’s logging library and similar? Why might we need something special for SOA and why aren’t existing techniques enough? The answer is simple and complex simultaneously – in SOA we are dealing with distributed and composed entities that cause problems in log maintenance, not in log creation.

Service Reuse and Entitlement

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 16:00:00 EDT

At a glance the reuse of a service and entitlement to those service results have nothing in common. But on the second thought, the more a service gets reused the greater the chance of serving users with different access rights to the service results. We'll discuss two models of reuse and see which one is more suitable for resolving data visibility tasks.

Considering the SOA Reference Model

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 13:45:00 EST

The main drivers for SOA-based architectures are to facilitate the manageable growth of large-scale enterprise systems, to facilitate Internet-scale provisioning and the use of services, and to reduce the cost of organization-to-organization cooperation - SOA RM

Considering the SOA Reference Model

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 06:00:00 EST

SOA RM: '...in SOA, services are the mechanism by which needs and capabilities are brought together' Recently OASIS voted the SOA Reference Model (SOA RM) into a standard. In spite of its high level of abstraction, this model emphasizes the business orientation of SOA.

Collecting Financial Market Data with Java 5

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 14:00:00 EST

In this article I'll share my experience in using the new features in Java 5 for solving an old industry problem, the problem of collecting constantly published financial data in reliable way. The business case example I'm going to discuss relates to the acquisition of some sort of market data published by a financial data source system like Reuters.

Service Versioning For SOA

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 16:15:00 EDT

(Found in a blog, 'Versioning is as inevitable as security.') SOA development practice isn't much different from other software development practices except for design and maintenance. Multiple self-containing and aggregated services that interact with others have their own lifecycle and evolution. The loosely coupling model of SOA services significantly simplifies design but creates additional difficulties in maintenance, especially in the interoperability of different service versions.

Does a Web Service Make a Service for SOA?

Sat, 13 May 2006 11:00:00 EDT

What could be easier than to take your application, wrap it with a Web Service, announce it or register it in the UDDI and get a SOA Service? Even better - take a data warehouse, cover a SQL executing code with a Web Service and expose it to SOA, isn't it simple? This article is for those architects and managers who like such 'simplicity.' If you believe that a Web Service itself doesn't convert an application into the SOA Service, you might read the article just out of curiosity.

WebLogic Journal: If a Resource Thread Hangs in the Portal

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 20:00:00 EST

This article describes a workaround design that allows a Portal to survive if its resource starts hanging request threads. How frequently does your Portal experience user requests hanging in the resource? Not frequently, I hope. However, if this happens and the resource continues hanging user requests, the Portal is exposed to a fatal risk of spending all of the configured concurrent user requests and eventually dies.

Assured Delivery of Audit Data With SOA and Web Services

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 13:15:00 EST

This article describes two techniques that may be used for assured delivery of important data, specifically, audit data, in distributed systems. We will review design that leads from assured to guaranteed delivery. This task gets more and more important in light of modern global operation risk regulations and related application risk management.

Entitlement to Data

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 14:00:00 EST

The requirements for different user-facing applications frequently say something like: 'User has to see/read/be shown only funds/records/itineraries/policies he or she is entitled to.' Permissions in these cases usually depend on multiple factors related to the user profile (job role, locale, etc.), to the protected data (data origin, storage, approval status, etc.), or to both. This represents the fine granular entitlement requirements that are rarely supported by commercial systems.

How To Deal With Architectural Security?

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 10:30:00 EDT

Application architects have heard about the increased importance of security, but in many cases they really don't know how to approach this issue. In this article, I'll share my experience and define a few basic steps and checkpoints for building application architecture with security in mind.