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Category SOA Challenges
Service Oriented Architecture has been a prominent theme in IT for a number of years. With Notes/Domino 8+ adding Composite Apps, Eclipse Contributions, Web Service consumers, and tools to integrate data from disparate sources into Domino applications ("on the glass" and otherwise), the promise of bringing the benefits of SOA to Domino applications is being realized.

Not surprisingly, SOA brings not only new opportunities, but also new challenges. One area of particular interest to me today is the complexity SOA can bring to managing applications through new dependencies on external services. IT organizations supporting applications taking advantage of SOA will need to put processes in place to handle changes to services.

We recently had an incident on this blog due to such a change: last week we discovered that comments on this blog were not being recorded.

We use an open-source, Domino-based blog who's contributors have put much effort into making it a first-class product; I won't speak to the strengths or weaknesses of the product because my focus here is on this problem of "coupling" that exists in integrating third-party services, which represents a much larger issue for SOA.

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Posted by Matt Vargish At 11:40 AM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category IT Governance Mashups Lotusphere
Several of the sessions I've attended so far at Lotusphere 2008, including the Opening General Session, have put a great deal of emphasis on a couple of concepts: Linking related information to provide context and depth (Mashups) and Social Computing. The idea seems to be to create tools that enable end users to define relationships between data that puts information in the appropriate context and therefore help identify its relevance and significance. An Enterprise 2.0 vision which includes traditional datasources supplemented with blogs, wikis, rss, tagging, social -networking -bookmarking -filtering, aggregated with the intent to shorten the distance between information and wisdom and thereby spark innovation. (more)

Posted by Matt Vargish At 4:31 PM | Location Orlando, FL USA | Permalink | Comments (3) |      

Category Coding Practices
Is the agent property “Run On Behalf Of” dangerous? Sure, you might say, but it’s obviously dangerous--a low-level access that should be granted with great care.

But I think that the UI in the Security tab of the Domino server document is a bit fragile or unclear on the significance of granting certain rights. As developers we sometimes talk about “fragile code”--code that works but is hard to change without creating bugs or other cascading effects. Changing it without fully understanding it can be dangerous. (more)

Posted by Matt Vargish At 3:03 PM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (5) |      

Category Coding Practices
One of the primary goals of any IT organization is delivering applications that improve the efficiency of business processes. As application developers, we can have tremendous impact on the day-to-day running of the business. Few things will generate user feedback more quickly than poor application performance. So with that in mind, I'd like to share some techniques for improving user experience that came up recently when troubleshooting some very slow views and view actions.

Optimizing Views is important, complex topic. There are a lot of great performance tips out there that address View performance and recommend best practices for designing Views. (more)

Posted by Matt Vargish At 12:00 PM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (0) |