Software is moving deeper into the real world. Embedded systems are hooking up with corporate backroom computers in new ways. A new systems ethos is emerging. IBM software scientist Grady Booch casts light on the issues, including how software design can be viewed through the lens of systems of systems.



Embedded system - Grady Booch - IBM - Companies - Software Development

For enterprise architects, the early days of EA were mostly about inventorying far-flung systems. This "documentation fever" may be giving way to enterprise architecture practices that lead to innovation and corporate agility. This and other matters were discussed at The Open Group Conference in Boston



Enterprise architecture - Open Group - Business - Boston - Design

There is a good chance the Android operating system for mobile devices can intrude far into the area currently occupied by operating systems such as Windows on the desktop. For one thing, it is service oriented. Moreover, as people spend more time online with Android they will push for more rapid release cycles with ever increasing capabilities. Android gives developers the tools to fill these needs.



Android - Operating system - Microsoft Windows - Mobile device - Windows

Today's applications can benefit from a wealth of data services supporting SOAP and REST. But enterprise applications along with SLAs must be carefully prepped to successfully employ such Web services. Enterprise mashups are growing as a means to tap into the Web data.



Web service - SOAP - Representational State Transfer - Programming - Service-Oriented Architecture

BPEL and BPMN have become closely integrated and are enabling the automation of business processes that involve not only Web services, but people processes as well.



Business process - Business Process Execution Language - Web service - Business Process Modeling Notation - Service-oriented architecture

An analytical tool from Tibco's Spotfire group does its work on a cloud computing platform. As a result, IT can more quickly deploy analytical systems and end-users can more rapidly share BI dashboards.



Tibco - Cloud computing - Business - Business intelligence - Spotfire

Facebook's highly innovative use of open APIs is proving very influential in Web application design. The company introduced a new API that will allow any page on the Internet to be managed like a Facebook fan page. The Open Graph API should make it easier to collect and manage data into the Facebook social graph.



Facebook - Application programming interface - Graph API - Social network - Open Graph API

Business process management (BPM) house Metastorm has joined the fledgling ''BPM in the cloud'' movement, releasing a cloud computing-based version of its BPM modeling tools. Metastorm joins Appian, Cordys and others testing the waters of cloud-hosted software for BPM. Notably, the Metastorm offering operate in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Metastorm M3 comprises a popular subset of its modeling tools for business process building. Supported model types include process/workflow, activity, rule, project, requirement, location and other models. Business users employing the tools can chat, whiteboard and annotate models online. The subset of Metastorm models can share a subset of Metastorm objects. ''We are using Azure to host our M3 Modeler,'' said Greg Carter, CTO, MetaStorm. ''The host and repository you store models in are on the Azure platform.'' ''It's like a gigantic copy of Windows on the cloud,'' he said, noting that M3 modeling also supports private cloud and on-premise architectures. While the runtime deployment of the BPM software still resides 'off-cloud,' one can picture a hosted runtime as a next step. The software could help cut time-to-deployment, allowing business teams to forge their models and bring process re-engineering long before IT installs runtime software and hardware. At the same time it released M3, Metastorm also announced an enterprise mashup system that allows Metastorm's software and other applications to be accessed from a single user interface.



Microsoft - Cloud computing - Microsoft Azure - Business process management - Cordys

Cost reduction efforts drive today's push for application modernization. The barriers to implementing application modernization are the initial cost, risk, business buy-in and subject matter expertise, according to a recent Forrester Research study.



Forrester Research - Business - Consulting - Risk Management - Financial services

As apps and APIs move front and center in the public consciousness, a mashup maker creates a platform for in-house application stores.



JackBe - Mashup - Application programming interface - Business - App Store

Business Process Management efforts call for systems that effectively mimic current processes, and which can make changes on the fly when exceptions occur. They respond to ad hoc needs.



Workflow - Business process - Business process management - Water treatment - Business

At Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Boston Red Hat released a portal platform supporting lightweight Web application tool sets like Seam, Spring, Ruby, Groovy and PHP.



Red Hat - JBoss - Ruby - JBoss Seam - Operating Systems

Of late, the Hibernate project has come to include functionality of the Plain-Old Java Object (POJO) kind for a number of cool uses. As well, Hibernate has been updated to support features found in Java Persistence API 2 (JPA 2).



Java - Java Persistence API - Plain-Old Java Object - Hibernate - JBoss application server

Internet transfer rates can be a gating factor for some cloud deployments. As a result Amazon's Web services have come to include Import/Export services to speed transfer of big data sets.



AWS Import/Export - Amazon.com - Cloud computing - Amazon S3 - Amazon Web Services

The occasion of IBM's newly unveiled Financial Markets Framework leads to some ruminations on the build-borrow-and-or-buy equation.



IBM - Hardware - Historical - Business - Companies

Instead of following a natural team tendency to pick the best and most creative applications for migration, Delta CIO Theresa Wise chose to focus on an application's value to the end-user, and the speed with which the application could be ready to run.

It is important to load test Web services separately from related applications and keep the results up to date because service traffic is much less predictable than application traffic, said Sagi Varghese, QA manager at JetBlue.



Web service - Service-oriented architecture - Programming - Business - Transportation and Logistics

Cloud computing took center stage when Microsoft announced support for .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 at Tech-Ed in New Orleans. Parallel libraries are one of several new features now supported in the Azure cloud platform, said Microsoft developer Scott Densmore.



Microsoft - New Orleans - Cloud computing - Azure - Microsoft Visual Studio

Some organizations are turning to cloud-based ESB implementations to bridge siloed departments and enhance B2B integration. But cloud architectures can make ESB implementation complicated. Connectivity, operational support and security are common trouble areas say some architects and consultants.



Cloud computing - Enterprise service bus - Security - Consultants - General and Freelance

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has come a long way since it came to industry attention in 2002 as a cure for proliferating, incompatible Web Services. Recently TechTarget and Forrester Research team members collaborated on this report to determine the state of SOA in the year 2010.



Service-oriented architecture - Web service - Forrester Research - Programming - FAQs Help and Tutorials