In the past decade "workflow" has become one of the most overloaded terms in
the software industry. Almost every application is tagged as "based on
workflow." While this doesn't always mean a lot, there is good reason for it;
it involves recognition among software architects that the business process
is the application.
With the advent of Web services, workflow vendors and enterprise application
integration (EAI) vendors are aligning themselves and often reinventing
themselves to make full use of Web services and the inherent strengths of the
asynchronous, loosely coupled software model. While Web services are powerful
in and of themselves, the combination of Web services with a process-based
approach is even stronger. This marriage of workflow with Web services is
often termed Web services orchestration.
Orchestration is a relatively new term, but it's already bein... (more)
The shift to e-business is fundamentally changing how systems look - and even
more important (for us developers) - how systems are built. To support
e-business, systems often evolve "from the outside in" - in the sense that a
Web site is put up quickly, and it reaches back slowly into the corporation's
back-end systems.
The other focus of e-business is the interconnections with partners' systems
- sometimes within the enterprise and sometimes outside the enterprise.
In today's e-business strategy the concept of "e-bonding" is no longer
far-fetched. E-bonding in this context is th... (more)
There are a number of skeletons in the closets of today's telecommunication
service providers. One of the scariest is that most service providers cannot
successfully deliver on the promises they make as service-level commitments
to their customers. Not do not or will not. Cannot. For many reasons,
successful service-level management in the competitive telecom arena remains
a theory - full of unfulfilled potential and many broken promises.
The OSS
When I was younger I had a sign on my monitor that read "to err is human; to
really make a mess requires a computer." This is a bit misl... (more)
Every computer science undergraduate program in the world has two important
foundation courses: data structures and algorithms. Open any book on these
subjects and you'll see immediately that almost a third of it is devoted to
graphs. Graphs are used to model a very large number of real-world problems:
the traveling salesman problem, efficient routing of a package, network
flows, and more - all are modeled as graphs and often solved by graph-based
algorithms.
A common use of a graph-based representation is that of a computation graph.
Simply put, it's a graph that models a set o... (more)
In my last article (WSDJ, Vol. 1, issue 4) I showed you how to use WebSphere
Studio Application Developer (WSAD) to develop and publish a Web service. You
saw how to use the Web services wizard to wrap an existing Java method as a
Web service and expose the metadata required for invoking the service. You
also saw how the UDDI Explorer is used to publish your service on a public
registry so others can find and use it. This month's focus is on discovering
the service and building a client that invokes the Web service. You'll learn
more about how WSAD hides the complexity and mechan... (more)
Ron Ben-Natan is Chief Technology Officer at ViryaNet Inc. Prior to that he worked for companies such as Intel, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Merrill Lynch and as a consultant at J.P. Morgan. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science in the field of distributed computing and has been architecting and developing distributed applications for over 15 years. His hobby is writing about how technology is used to solve real problems and he has authored numerous books including “IBM WebSphere Application Server: The Complete Reference” published by Osborne/McGraw. He can be reached at
Scott Sellers
Anthony Franco
Daniel Morris
Wayne Walls
Niki Acosta
Jereme Hancock
Oren Michels
Marvin Wheeler
Douglas Kim
