Something I talk about in our Architect’s course is the structure of the ESB and how this relates to Mule and a Mule topology. Often, people think of an ESB as a single box on a diagram and then assume that they would have one single Mule running in their enterprise which represents that single box.

This is not the case.

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Paul De Winne delivered a well-prepared session at Devoxx 2008 where he spoke about how business components can be built with reusability in mind.  He works for HP and has often been called in to consult on projects that have problems with reusability and used a few war stories to add colour to his points.  His key points were:

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REST was featured one other time at Devoxx in a talk by Cristina Lau from IBM who showed us a REST based architecture for work flow management.  Given my interest in BPM, I was curious to see what this is all about. Coincidentally, I’m also curious about BPM and will be working with BPMS in the near future so this talk seemed like it might hit the spot.

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I was reading Thomas Erl’s  “SOA – Principles of Service Design” and came across an interesting statement that I had never seen written before, despite it being so obvious.

“Much of service-orientation is geared toward producing services with long life-spans. In fact longevity is a highly desirable design characteristic of service contracts and is also a measurable success indicator as to how well service-orientation was originally applied”

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I’m reading Thomas Erl’s “Principles of Service Design”.  So far, I’m finding it to be a good read since Mr Erl takes great care to explain what the SOA space is all about and what, exactly, a service should be.  I do have a slight objection to his use of the term Utility Services

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While reading Dan Power’s From Customer Cleanup to Data Governance, I found myself thinking of a data cleansing operation I was in charge of a few years back. I’ve written about data cleansing before, but these lessons learnt will be valuable for anyone attempting a similar operation

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Another interesting article on bitpipe.com about SOA Governance (free registration required) talks about SOA Governance in simple terms, without focusing on a specific product. I like this white paper because:

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From time to time, I see a rather unusual question popping up on the user lists (or in class) which causes me to step back and question my own beliefs. While I do tend to think of some things as being “obvious” (or which should be “common sense”), “obvious” is always relative to your standpoint. In integration work and Mule applications, this depends on your level of expertise – but it may also depend on your language skills (see disclaimer below).

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When data is placed on to an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), it really should be validated to ensure that data which is accepted is accurate and correct.  This is a fairly common strategy and I’ve seen it in a number of Mule applications. The big question is – Where should this validation logic be? In a transformer? In a router? In a service?

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A recent (short) case study published on techtarget.com shows what gains 3Com enjoyed after moving to a Service Oriented Architecture.

The line that put a smile on my face is this one: “His first step in planning for a conversion to SOA was to analyze his application portfolio”

As many of my ex-students can attest, there always is a lively discussion at the beginning of our “Architecting Enterprise Applications Using Mule” course as this is one of the first things we recommend doing too. Some students disagree that this is important, some disagree on what an application should constitute and others aren’t sure if any of us is making sense!

What’s your take on this?

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