Just came across a very good article by Marc de Graauw over at InfoQ on why WS-RM is useless. His main point being that usually when you have reliable messaging requirements, they should be handled at the business logic layer rather than at the “transport layer”. I encountered some similar issues earlier this year when [...]
Over the past few years I’ve been helping a lot of government clients design and implement architectures for information-sharing. When it comes to information-sharing one of the most important aspects is the relationships in the data being shared because it’s those relationships that provide the context to help you understand and utilize the information better. [...]
If you’re like me and prefer working with the raw XML in your web service implementations instead of dealing with the mess of generated data binding code, this article will show you how to do so using JAX-WS and XPath. In this example, we use this approach to implement a WS-Notification consumer service that receives [...]
There are a variety message exchange patterns that can be used to implement an SOA. Know them and when to apply them. It can mean the difference between an SOA that scales and performs vs. one that doesn’t. The traditional synchronous request/response may not always be the most appropriate in all scenarios. Here are some [...]
Those of you who’ve worked on very large scale enterprise-wide architectures know that it’s always the people and politics that are the biggest hurdles. I came across the term “politecture” in Nick Malik’s blog here. You can follow the link for the definition, but it’s essentially an architecture that’s been designed with the influence of [...]
The RESTful approach is very attractive for large scale integration scenarios that cross many organizational boundaries. This is because the constraints imposed by the REST principles emphasize interoperability and scalability. The constraint of uniform interfaces supports those scenarios in which the consumer base for the services is so broad that it makes it difficult to [...]
The SOAP WS-* approach provides a broad set of standards and specifications for quality of service features and also gives developers a lot of flexibility to define custom interfaces for the services that they wish to expose. This flexibility is useful for application-to-application integration scenarios internal to an organization. This is also useful in scenarios [...]
Been doing some work with web services management lately and looking at the various standards and specs for that stuff, most notably WSDM and WS-Management. It’s always frustrating when you have competing standards. So not only are WSDM and WS-Management competing standards but they are built on top of other competing standards, e.g. WS-Notification vs. [...]
A common thing to do these days is to create data access web services directly on top of your databases to open up access to that data to other services and applications, essentially creating a data services layer for your SOA. I’ve even recommended such an approach before. While conceptually this may be a good [...]
Articles like this are misleading. XML compression will reduce the size of the message and thus reduce the time to transfer the message. But if you’ve ever done any performance testing and profiling on Web services, you will know that most of the times the performance bottlenecks are not in the message transfer but the [...]
