tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-106899122008-07-17T14:53:21.594-04:00Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comBlogger57125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-25282371839064288612008-07-17T14:34:00.002-04:002008-07-17T14:53:21.604-04:00

A client I work with mentioned that for high security related projects, that developing them in an open source way will actually decrease the security provided by the project. The idea being that if anyone can see the architecture and code while it is being developed they can prepare to compromise the security. This made sense at the time and I nodded, but after chewing on it for a few weeks I

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-19847298891890718662008-04-04T19:36:00.000-04:002008-04-03T13:44:29.615-04:00

One of my clients came to me a few weeks ago with an interesting challenge: They want enterprise SOA, but have no money. This client is an extremely federated organization with multiple IT groups all receiving their own funding. There's definitely a need for enterprise SOA (governance, infrastructure, practices) but no authority to back anything official. So in light of these restrictions,

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-61744361581564327742008-04-03T13:24:00.003-04:002008-04-03T13:35:57.479-04:00

Chris Anderson published Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business last month and it got me thinking about some of the business/technical associations I associate with. Over the years, I've been a member of a few groups: IEEE, IASA, AJUG, NYJSIG, etc etc. I'm also familiar with some of the major professional organizations: PMI, OMG, IETF, W3C, JCP. Some of these were free (IETF, AJUG, NYJSIG)

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-44189831495342612192007-10-26T15:52:00.000-04:002007-10-26T16:19:24.096-04:00

I was cleaning out my briefcase and found some notes I had written down about what characteristics I need in an SOA registry (or repository if you're one of those people). I've seen almost all of these features spread out across a couple of different products, but I think eventually you will need these in order to have a successful SOA implementation. Each of these items deserves a whole post,

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-48428947211185808242007-09-21T19:38:00.000-04:002007-09-21T16:41:50.695-04:00

One of my clients asked me a pretty common question this week: "Is it possible to develop a Technology Standards Profile (Technical Reference Model since we're in the FEA space) without working on the Service Component Profile?"I will also add the question of whether you can do this without the Business Architecture. His goal is a valid one: his organization has many disparate divisions and

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-76615165057996274172007-09-06T21:13:00.000-04:002007-09-05T21:20:42.523-04:00

IBM announced two weeks ago that they would launch a free 12 week SOA mentor program to their IT certification program. Just email fedsoa@us.ibm.com to register for the program. There's a real world meeting on Sep 12, but everything else is through email and webex. You still need to pay for the exams, but free classes are cool.

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-49485933693972104372007-09-05T20:36:00.000-04:002007-09-05T21:02:01.257-04:00

I was recently at the PHIN 2007 conference facilitating a stakeholder group on collaboration and witnessed the following conversation with state and local public health partners: Person A: We would benefit if we had a common strategy defined that we could follow. Person B: Yes, we could define our processes so we could compare what we have in common and collaboration on systems. A: Then we

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-86571866615256033742007-08-31T21:14:00.000-04:002007-09-05T21:08:51.124-04:00

My google alert picked up Stefan Tilkov's post agreeing with Radovan Janecek's Anti-SOA post. So I will add in my own equally valid opinion to this chain. To recap, Stefan and Radovan think that commonly accepted infrastructure pieces like ESBs and BPEL are actually detrimental to SOA. While some of their points are accurate (encouraging P2P service communication rather than funnelling all SOA

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-85085186164611204522007-08-24T20:43:00.000-04:002007-08-24T13:01:25.163-04:00

My company recently sponsored me to become a certified enterprise architect through the Federal Enterprise Architecture Certification Institute. It was a pretty interesting program and I thought I'd post a few thoughts here in case anyone else is considering plunking down the money and time. The program is a mixture of in class seminars, online coursework and exams, real life exams and oral

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-70749015641935541962007-06-25T19:42:00.000-04:002007-06-25T20:02:59.324-04:00

So two weeks ago, I was attending the Gartner Architecture, Development and Integration Summit in Nashville. It was my first Gartner conference and had its ups and downs, but that is not why I'm writing. Gartner has these gaps in the agenda where only sponsors present. The presentations are usually dry (although I saw some good ones's- specifically BEA's AquaLogic and the Infravio/WebMethods/

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-30987153162546909352007-05-23T22:10:00.000-04:002007-05-23T22:35:17.169-04:00

Lately a few people have asked me about what Enterprise Architecture is and how they can learn more about it because that's what they'd like to get into. Now of course this is rather curious, because who is out there doing so much PR that people who don't know what EA is want to become an EA. While we all ponder that, I have collected a few good starting places that I've found useful. I'm not

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-1169041464676730752007-01-17T20:33:00.000-05:002007-08-31T10:25:40.984-04:00

This morning I was downloading the latest episode of twit as part of iTunes 7.0.2.16 syncing my podcasts and I noticed it taking forever. The mp3 file is only 34 megs or so, but it was scheduled to take over 10 minutes. I'm downloading from my client site and the connection is very quick over here. As a test, I went to the twit site and downloaded the mp3. Only 50 seconds using Internet Explorer

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-1168880482304961202007-01-15T11:55:00.000-05:002007-01-15T12:18:58.666-05:00

I'm procrastinating from preparing a powerpoint deck to present some SOA principles to a group of consultants that my sub-contracting client employs. So I noticed that I haven't updated my blog in quite a while. The real reason behind this is that I don't really interact with Java that much from a day to day basis. But I did recently work with a group that is trying to get JBoss approved at a US

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-1165964656907827732006-12-12T17:52:00.000-05:002006-12-12T18:04:16.916-05:00

I'm not the biggest sports fan. Neither is my friend, Carlo (name changed to protect the innocent). Because of this, we will frequently have this conversation when necessity dictates that we talk about sports. Carlo: Did you see that game? Me: Yes, that was a close one. What did you think of that critical action that made a major difference to the outcome? C:That player is overrated. The

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-1163808608890920172006-11-17T19:04:00.000-05:002006-11-17T19:10:08.913-05:00

So curiously enough, the architect titles came up again and again in my interviews. Each company I interviewed with asked how I defined "Architect" and the different stages, and each one defined their own hierarchy differently. So after a month or so of interviewing, I accepted a position as an enterprise architect sub-contractor to a Big5 consulting company at a pretty interesting client here

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-1162220225331516822006-10-30T21:44:00.000-05:002006-10-30T13:24:26.873-05:00

Since one of my main responsibilities is to keep up with goings on in the SOA/EAI/EA space, I try to read a ton of blogs and web sites. eBizQ has been pretty handy with their free webinars. They are usually dull (as their archive shows such gems as "Measuring the Value of BPM", "The ROI of SOA" and "Where Data Meets SOA: Data Services"), but are actually a pretty decent source of ammo for when

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-1160678746601581822006-10-12T20:31:00.000-04:002006-10-12T14:45:46.636-04:00

A few weeks ago, I read a serverside post that referenced marty andrews' post about defining software architecture roles. These posts happened just in time, as in the past two weeks I've been asked this question over and over. My employer has been trying to define what exactly an architect is so they can create a career path for other engineers and architects. Currently we have: Associate

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-1160673930130295832006-10-12T13:12:00.000-04:002006-10-12T14:30:11.320-04:00

I started to reply to ginni's comment to my last post but ran out of room so I will expand on a separate post. Since specifying the provider wasn't working properly, I had to skip the JCE API and call out to BouncyCastle directly. Following the 1.34 javadoc, I wrote some code like this: byte[] clearBytes = myString.getBytes("UTF8"); org.bouncycastle.crypto.digests.MD5Digest md5Digest = new

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-1158861650976564402006-09-21T20:43:00.000-04:002006-09-21T14:02:35.260-04:00

I recently worked around a curious multithreading bug on IBM's AIX JRE. It was one of those painful, but interesting bugs that I thought I should share. One of the developers I work with reported an issue with a piece of code that generates GUIDs. The error only manifested under heavy loads running in OAS and only on IBM's AIX JRE (build 1.4.1, J2RE 1.4.1 IBM AIX build ca1411-20030930).

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-1156186107146284162006-08-21T22:29:00.000-04:002006-08-21T23:38:27.100-04:00

Today I was having a problem with my for a particular working in OAS 10g-9.0.4, but not on WebSphere-5.1. After poking around a bit, it ends up that OAS, OC4J and Tomcat are forgiving/ feature rich when sticking to the Servlet spec and WAS (at least 5.1) is pretty stringent. The Servlet specification's web.xml DTD provides the to define a particular pattern to match on for particular

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-1155918100710155692006-08-18T23:53:00.000-04:002006-08-18T12:21:40.820-04:00

Since my company is rolling out all our web services across our SOA stack I wanted an easy way to test web services using SOAP over HTTP. More specifically, I wanted a tool easy enough to show biz/ analyst people how to execute web services. My requirements were pretty simple, given a WSDL file, present me with a UI to enter all the fields, then submit the request and show me the response in a

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-1151527320689351842006-06-28T20:33:00.000-04:002006-06-28T16:42:00.713-04:00

A colleague of mine pointed out this Financial Times India article that is pretty interesting. I'm a firm proponent of off-shoring (not necessarily outsourcing) and developing software abroad. In fact, I think that if you aren't off-shoring properly now, you won't be in business 5 years from now. This article talks about how salaries in India's IT sector are increasing dramatically for

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-1149403065914596212006-06-04T02:18:00.000-04:002006-06-04T02:37:45.926-04:00

The tech economy has heated up and seems to be back to 2000 era levels. The unemployment rate for technology is down to 2.5% so I don't talk to my colleagues too much about changing careers. But a few years ago, it was a different story. A lot of time was spent worrying about what to do when we all lost our jobs programming and analyzing and dba'ing. I knew some people who had sort of armageddon

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-1147827329339181052006-05-16T20:40:00.000-04:002006-05-16T20:55:29.353-04:00

My company is kind enough to shell out and send me to JavaOne this year. One of the may ways they are pretty decent. Since I'm here I figure I'll add to the infinite supply of JavaOne blogs and add my first impressions. Sun really has some sharp people doing presentations. The Ajaxian presentation was great and their SOA sessions have some decent perceptions that don't tow the "sun way" blargh.

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10689912.post-1147115975515519312006-05-08T22:01:00.000-04:002006-05-08T15:19:35.533-04:00

So, my project does a lot of in-memory xml manipulations. This means we add, remove and even move xml nodes within a document. We chose dom4j because it has the fastest writes, edits and xpath (using jaxen) among dom4j, jdom, xerces+xalan and xerces+jaxen. Anyway, I started running into some strange errors when I tried to move an element within a document. A move consists of detaching an element

Brian Alexander Leehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04154356447489829768noreply@blogger.com