Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Archive for July, 2007

I was listening to an Inflection Point podcast from the Burton Group entitled Enterprise 2.0: Overcoming Fear of Blogs and thought that this was a subject that I hadn’t posted anything about. The topic of the podcast was the use of blogs and wikis internally within the enterprise, rather than enterprise workers blogging to the outside world, which is a different subject.

The interviewer, Mike Gotta, made the comment that blogs within the enterprise need to be purposeful, and that there’s a fear that they will simply be a soap box or a place to rant. To any manager or executive that has a fear about them becoming a place for employees to rant, you’re looking at the wrong issue. If employees feel a need to rant, they’ll be doing it in the hallways, break rooms, and cafeteria. If anything, blogging could bring some of this out in the open and allow something to be done about it. This is where I think there is real value for blogging, wikis, etc. in the enterprise. I recently had a post titled Transparency in Architecture that talked about a need for projects to make their architectural decisions transparent throughout the process (and the same holds true for enterprise architects and their development of reference architectures and strategies). Blogs and wikis create an opportunity to increase the transparency in enterprise efforts. I’ve worked in environments that had a “need to know” policy for legitimate reasons, but for most enterprises, this shouldn’t be the case. When information isn’t shared, it may be a symptom of lack of trust in the enterprise, which can be disastrous for SOA or anything else IT does.

Blogs and wikis are about communication and collaboration. Communication and collaboration help to build up trust. That being said, you do need to be respectful of the roles and responsibilities within the organization. There’s a time and place for debate, and there’s a time and place for adherence to policies. I’ve been in the trenches and had my fair share of times where I didn’t agree with a decision that was made by people above me in the organization. I also understood that it wasn’t my decision to make. In general, however, I believe that things would have been better if there were transparency behind those decisions. That’s important because the principles that guide those decisions wind up influencing the decisions that are made further down the line. If the staff has no visibility to those principles, how can they be expected to make good decisions? The end result of that situation is increased distrust on both sides. It’s not easy to do, because once you expose that information, it leaves you open for debate, which is where mutual trust must come into play. Betrayals of trust either by not disclosing information or by misusing information that was disclosed can be detrimental.

In general, I’m an optimist and I give people the benefit of the doubt. As a result, I’m all for transparency and the use of blogs and wikis in the enterprise. Will blogs and wikis dramatically change the way IT works? Probably not, but it certainly has the potential to improve morale which certainly have a role in improving productivity.

A new Greg the Architect video has been posted, called Focus Pocus. I wasn’t aware of this before, but it’s now known that TIBCO is the driving force behind this series of videos. Anyway, watch Greg and his boss visit an SOA conference at “the Biscotti Center” in “beautiful, exotic, tropical … downtown San Francisco.”

Dana Gardner invited me to be a part of his Briefings Direct SOA Insights podcast a while back, and the first episode I was part of is now available. Topics included SOA hype, the SoftwareAG/WebMethods acquisition, and the role of Web 2.0 and wikis in SOA. Details are available here, or you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here.

I’ve always enjoyed listening to panel discussions, and now it’s great to have the opportunity to be a regular part of one. If there are particular topics you’d like to hear discussed, feel free to drop me a line and I’ll pass along the suggestion. Dana’s got a great group of people that participate on these sessions.

It’s been a while since I posted something more infrastructure related. Since my original post on the convergence of infrastructure in the middle was reasonably popular, I thought I’d talk specifically about the ESB: Enterprise Service Bus. As always, I hope to present a pragmatic view that will help you make decisions on whether an ESB is right for you, rather than coming out with a blanket opinion that ESBs are good, bad, or otherwise.

From information I’ve read, there are at least five types of ESBs that exist today:

1. Formerly EAI, now ESB
2. Formerly BPM, now ESB
3. Formerly MOM/ORB, now ESB
4. The WS-* Enabling ESB
5. The ESB Gateway

Formerly EAI, now ESB

There’s no shortage of ESB products that people will claim are simply rebranding efforts of products formerly known as EAI tools. The biggest thing to consider with these is that they are developer tools. Their strengths are going to lie in their integration capabilities, typically in mapping between schemas and having a broad range of adapters for third party products. There’s no doubt that these products can save a lot of time when working with large commercial packages. At the same time, however, this would not be the approach I’d take for a load balancing or content-based routing solution. Those are typically operational concerns where we’d prefer to configure rather than code. Just because you have a graphical tool doesn’t mean it doesn’t require a developer to use it.

Formerly BPM, now ESB

Many ESBs are adding orchestration capabilities, a domain typically associated with BPM products. In fact, many BPM products are simply rebranding of EAI products, and there’s at least one I know of that is now also marketed as an ESB. There’s definitely a continuum here, and the theme is much the same. It’s a graphical modeling tool that is schema driven, possibly with built-in adapter technology, definitely with BPEL import/export, but still requires a developer to properly leverage it.

Both of these two categories are great if your problem set centers around orchestration and building new services in a more efficient manner. If you’re interested in sub-millisecond operations for security, routing, throttling, instrumentation, etc., recognize that these solutions are primarily targeted toward business processing and integration, not your typical “in-the-middle” non-functional concerns. It is certainly true that from a modeling perspective, the graphical representation of a processing pipeline is well-suited for the non-functional concerns, but it’s the execution performance that really matters.

Formerly MOM/ORB, now ESB

These products bring things much closer to non-functional world, although as more and more features are thrown at the ESB umbrella, they may start looking more like one of the first two approaches. In both cases, these products try to abstract away the underlying transport layer. In the case of MOM, all service communication is put onto some messaging backbone. The preferred model is to leverage agents/adapters on both endpoints (e.g. having a JMS client library for both the consumer and provider), potentially not requiring any centralized hub in the middle. The scalability of messaging systems certainly can’t be denied, however, the bigger concern is whether agents/adapters can be provided for all systems. All of the products will certainly have a fallback position of a gateway model via SOAP/HTTP or XML/HTTP, but you lose capabilities in doing so. For example, having endpoint agents can ensure reliable message delivery. If one endpoint doesn’t have it, you’ll only be reliable up to the gateway under control of the ESB. In other words, you’re only as good as your weakest link. One key factor in looking at this solution is the heterogeneity of your IT environment. The more varied systems you have, the greater challenge you have in finding an ESB that supports all of them. In an environment where performance is critical, these may be good options to investigate, knowing that a proprietary messaging backbone can yield excellent performance, versus trying to leverage something like WS-RM over HTTP. Once again, the operational model must be considered. If you need to change a contract between a consumer and a provider, the non-functional concerns are enforced at the endpoint adapters. These tools must have a model where those policies can be pushed out to the nodes, rather than requiring a developer to change some code or model and go through a development cycle.

The WS-* Enabling ESB

This category of product is the ESB that strives to allow an enterprise to have a WS-* based integration model. Unlike the MOM/ORB products, they probably only require the use of agents on the service provider side, essentially to provide some form of service enablement capability. In other words, a SOAP stack. While 5 years ago this may have been very important, most major platforms now provide SOAP stacks, and many of the large application vendors provide SOAP-based integration points. If you don’t have an enterprise application server, these may be worthwhile options to investigate, as you’ll need some form of SOAP stack. Unlike simply adding Axis on top of Tomcat, these options may provide the ability to have intercommunication between nodes, effectively like a clustered application server. If not apparent, however, these options are very developer focused. Service enablement is a development activity. Also, like the MOM/ORB solutions, these products can operate in a gateway mode, but you do lose capabilities. Like the BPM/EAI solutions, these products are focused on building services, so there’s a good chance that they may not perform as well for the “in-the-middle” capabilities typically associated with a gateway.

The ESB Gateway

Finally, there are ESB products that operate exclusively as a gateway. In some cases, this may be a hardware appliance, it could be software on commodity hardware, or it could be a software solution deployed as a stand-alone gateway. While the decision between a smart-network or smart-node approach is frequently a religious one, there are certainly scenarios where a gateway makes sense. Perimeter operations are the most common, but it’s also true that many organizations don’t employ clustering technologies in their application servers, but instead leverage front-end load balancers. If your needs focus exclusively on the “in-the-middle” capabilities, rather than on orchestration, service enablement, or integration, these products may provide the operational model (configure not code) and the performance you need. Unlike an EAI-rooted system, an appliance is typically not going to provide an integrate anything-to-anything model. Odds are that it will provide excellent performance along a smaller set of protocols, although there are integration appliances that can talk to quite a number of standards-based systems.

Final words

As I’ve stated before, the number one thing is to know what capabilities you need first, before ever looking at ESBs, application servers, gateways, appliances, web services management products, or anything else. You also need to know what the operational model is for those capabilities. Are you okay with everything being a development activity and going through a code release cycle, or are there things you want to be fully controlled by an operational staff that configures infrastructure according to a standard change management practice? There’s no right or wrong answer, it all depends on what you need. Orchestration may be the number one concern for some. Service-enablement of legacy systems to another. Another organization may need security and rate throttling at the perimeter. Hopefully this post will help you on your decision making process. If I missed some of the ESB models out there or if you disagree with this breakdown, please comment or trackback. This is all about trying to help end users better understand this somewhat nebulous space.

It’s funny how these syndicated feeds can be just like syndicated TV. I’ve decided to leverage Google Analytics and create a post with links to the most popular entries since January 2006. My blog isn’t really a diary of activities, but a collection of opinions and advice that hopefully remain relevant. While the occasional Google search will lead you to find many of these, many of these items have long since dropped off the normal RSS feed. So, much like the long-running TV shows like to clip together a “best of” show, here’s my “best of” entry according to Google Analytics.

• Barriers to SOA Adoption: This was originally posted on May 4, 2007, and was in response to a ZapThink ZapFlash on the subject.
• Reusing reuse…: This was originally posted on August 30, 2006, and discusses how SOA should not be sold purely as a means to achieve reuse.
• Service Taxonomy: This was originally posted on December 18, 2006 and was my 100th post. It discusses the importance and challenges of developing a service taxonomy.
• Is the SOA Suite good or bad? This was originally posted on March 15, 2007 and stresses that whatever infrastructure you select (suite or best-of-breed), the important factor is that it fit within a vendor-independent target architecture.
• Well defined interfaces: This post is the oldest one on the list, from February 24, 2006. It discusses what I believe is the important factor in creating a well-defined interface.
• Uptake of Complex Event Processing (CEP): This post from February 19, 2007 discusses my thoughts on the pace that major enterprises will take up CEP technologies and certainly raised some interesting debate from some CEP vendors.
• Master Metadata/Policy Management: This post from March 26, 2007 discusses the increasing problem of managing policies and metadata, and the number of metadata repositories than may exist in an enterprise.
• The Power of the Feedback Loop: This post from January 5, 2007 was one of my favorites. I think it’s the first time that a cow-powered dairy farm was compared to enterprise IT.
• The expanding world of the “repistry”: This post from August 25, 2006 discusses registries, repositories, CMDBs and the like.
• Preparing the IT Organization for SOA: This is a June 20, 2006 response to a question posted by Brenda Michelson on her eBizQ blog, which was encouraging a discussion around Business Driven Architecture.
• SOA Maturity Model: This post on February 15, 2007 opened up a short-lived debate on maturity models, but this is certainly a topic of interested to many enterprises.
• SOA and Virtualization: This post from December 11, 2006 tried to give some ideas on where there was a connection between SOA and virtualization technologies. It’s surprising to me that this post is in the top 5, because you’d think the two would be an apples and oranges type of discussion.
• Top-Down, Bottom-Up, Middle-Out, Outside-In, Chicken, Egg, whatever: Probably one of the longest titles I’ve had, this post from June 6, 2006 discusses the many different ways that SOA and BPM can be approached, ultimately stating that the two are inseparable.
• Converging in the middle: This post from October 26, 2006 discusses my whole take on the “in the middle” capabilities that may be needed as part of SOA adoption along with a view of how the different vendors are coming at it, whether through an ESB, an appliance, EAI, BPM, WSM, etc. I gave a talk on this subject at Catalyst 2006, and it’s nice to see that the topic is still appealing to many.
• SOA and EA… This post on November 6, 2006 discussed the perceived differences between traditional EA practitioners and SOA adoption efforts.

Hopefully, you’ll give some of these older items a read. Just as I encouraged in my feedback loop post, I do leverage Google Analytics to see what people are reading, and to see what items have staying power. There’s always a spike when an entry is first posted (e.g. my iPhone review), and links from other sites always boost things up. Once a post has been up for a month, it’s good to go back and see what people are still finding through searches, etc.

As previously mentioned, I was the first iPhone buyer at the AT&T store nearest to my house. While there’s no shortage of iPhone reviews out there, I’m not a professional reviewer, so my focus is on how well it does the things I need it to do.

Choosing a model

I chose the 8GB model, simply because when I purchased the original iPod, I had the 5GB model and spent about a year managing songs because I kept running out of space. While 8GB clearly isn’t large enough for my entire music library, that’s why I have my other iPod. I planned on using the iPhone solely for podcasts and video. Since I have been traveling quite a bit, I needed one that I could comfortably store about 2-3 hours of video. To give you an idea on space requirements, an hour long TV show with the commercials edited out tends to be around 250 MB at 320×200. A two-hour long movie at 640×400 is about 1.33 GB. The decision I’ll need to make is how much music to put on it. I’ve got over 2200 songs in my full library. I put together a playlist of my favorite artists which wound up being 479 songs at 3.01 GB. The normal collection of daily/weekly updating podcasts took up about 300 MB, so clearly, the music library will be where I need to do some creative management. If you don’t already have an iPod, the smaller storage will be an issue if you want to carry your full music library. Given this requirement, I think a nice improvement would be a means to designate a certain amount of space for music and then tell iTunes to fill it with random music, just as you can do with the shuffle.

Activation

Activation went without a hitch for me. I had no issues whatsoever. I transferred my existing phone number from T-Mobile, and even that only took about 15 minutes to complete. So, my experience here was very, very good. While I had my laptop with me, I waited until I got home to activate, as my battery was down to about 6% after using it while I was waiting in line. I didn’t want to take a chance on having it go dead during activation.

Signal Strength and Call Quality

T-Mobile’s signal strength in my house has always been weak. While I’m in a coverage zone, the particular geography around my house doesn’t lend itself to a strong signal with T-Mobile unless I’m on the top floor. AT&T’s strength likewise goes down as I go downstairs, but is far better. The first call I made (while on the top floor) was crystal clear. This was a significant improvement over T-Mobile. For reference, I was previously using a Motorola V360.

The Calling Interface

I found myself wanting an Address Book icon on the home page. To get to your contacts, you first have to enter into phone mode, and then access your contacts. Once you’re there, making a call is a snap. Cycling through my contact list on my V360 was a slow painful process, the UI on the iPhone makes it a snap. One of the first things I did after using the iPhone once was to put a lot more contacts into the group that I sync with my phone, because it’s so much more manageable.

The second thing that I really liked was the ability to hold a conversation on the speaker phone and run other applications. I was talking to my mom and needed to write something down. She asked if I had a pencil, and I instead tried something out. I put her on speakerphone, hit the Home button, and then launched Notes. The whole time, I could keep the conversation going and just typed as she talked. This was very cool.

The On-Screen Keyboard

I think the pre-release reviews were right on with this one. Overall, it takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s far better than I expected. I think with some practice, it will easily be nearly as fast as a tactile keyboard. The visual and audio cues are more than enough feedback. The only slightly awkward thing is that the automatic word correction is accepted when you hit space bar. If you’ve typed in a word and it is suggesting something else, you have a problem if you just hit space to keep typing the next sentence. Perhaps this will encourage us techies to stop talking in acronyms, because that’s typically where you’ll run into this situation!

Connecting to the Network

Configuring it to use my WiFi network was a bit tricky. It came up with a list of networks to choose from, but I only saw my neighbors’. My access point doesn’t advertise its name, so I needed to manually type it in. The popup that shows up when it detects access points doesn’t allow you to do this. You have to go to the home menu and then to Settings to manually enter a network name. This is a one-time operation, as it remembers past settings. It would have been more convenient to add an “Other…” option to the default popup.

The speed has not been an issue with me. I’ve brought up web pages (ESPN) and Google Maps when on the EDGE network at the local Dairy Queen as well as at a friend’s house, and the speed was acceptable. It’s certainly not as fast as my Sprint Broadband modem (U720), but for what I need to use the iPhone for, it was fine. Incidentally, I had Google Maps on Satellite mode, so I was probably downloading more data than normal maps usage, and I still found it just fine.

The iPod

The iPod capabilities are outstanding. When people complain about the higher price of this compared to other smartphones, you really need to consider the interface presented for watching videos and listening to music. Besides the truly outstanding screen which makes video watching far more enjoyable than on my current Video iPod, the experience is just great. This alone I think justifies the price difference between a typical smartphone and the iPhone.

Surfing the Web

I’m really surprised at how well the experience is. The logic they’ve put in place to scale the display even when fully zoomed out is outstanding. The zooming experience is even better. The only trick is when you’ve got some ad-heavy page being displayed. You’re best off letting the whole page load, doing a nice slow zoom-in, and then clicking on what you need. I’ve had an occasion where I wanted to zoom, tapped to quickly and inadvertently clicked on some add, because the page was zoomed out. The one slick feature I like is how the Safari controls disappear once the page is fully loaded, and only show up when you pan the page back to the top. This reserves more screen space for working with the page.

I would like to see more pages optimized for the iPhone. For example, I frequently go to the MLB scores page on ESPN.com. While it’s fully usable on the iPhone, having a version that was specifically designed for the iPhone interface would be even better. For example, the page should be optimized so that if you are viewing it in landscape mode, the screen would be filled with the line score for one game. I expect we’ll see more and more of this as the iPhone agent starts showing up in people’s log results.

Camera

The camera has performed very well for me. Despite not having a flash, the quality of pictures taken indoors at night with normal interior lighting has been very good. Once again, the integration and ability to send pictures to contacts was far less clunky than on my old Motorola phone.

Overall

Overall, I’m very happy with my purchase. I think it’s worth every penny I paid for it. Just as with the original iPod, it’s not that Apple is providing some particular functionality that other phones don’t have, it’s the way that Apple has made that functionality available to the end user that makes the difference. This is something that you really can’t put into words, as you have to use it to understand it. I think Apple’s videos have done a good job in showing this. If you just look at a feature list, and compare it based on checkmarks, you won’t really understand what the difference is. About the only knock I have on the user interface is that I find myself wishing for a “back” button on many occasions. For example, if you click on a link in email, it opens Safari. To get back to email, you need to go to the home menu, and then email. I’d prefer than if I closed the Safari window or had a back arrow, that it would take me back to email. Outside of this, the user experience is simply outstanding. Yes, I’d like to see an AIM or Jabber client on it, but I expect that will come. On a five-star scale, I’d definitely give the device 5 stars. Is there room for improvement? Yes. Can this phone be considered an elite smartphone? Yes.