On Architecture, Integration, Development Tool and Small Wins

Hi …,

On the architecture side, except the patterns, there are two fundamental ideas that are getting momentum in the industry. One is that of OSGi. It is the base of Eclipse's architecture. Eclipse is destined to play a major role in the application interface side. Having a rigorous support of plug and play for application systems is a progress in computing of much significance. The second one is that of chained interceptors. JBoss' core is built upon this idea (with JMX); Tomcat, Servlet Filter and Bea's web service support are all applying chained interceptors. It is a relatively simple architecture, but can be very powerful, particularly when it is combined with hot deployment and various group communication mechanisms. The value it brings into the landscape is to separate and isolate different concerns. It more or less can be compared to the assembly line of the industrial manufacturing.

In my opinion, the Enterprise Integration Patterns book is one of the best technical books published in last several years in the application development domain. It covers mainly the asynchronous design patterns. Recently there are a lot of discussions on ESB and most of the topics appeared in those discussions can be found in this book. Together with the architectural ideas of JCA, Jini and JXTA, they may already cover all the major technical solutions for EAI or B2B currently available in the market (see documents for products from Tibco, webMethods, IBM etc.).

Maven is a very nice tool, can be used as the foundation to carry out most of the software development life cycle. But it is just a tool. With the new capabilities introduced in the latest version of Ant, it may be more difficult for Maven to become popular in the developers cycle. My thinking is that when the concern is a tool, you always choose one that most of the developers are comfortable to use. In technology, it is not always a good or bad issue, most of the cases the critical factor determining the outcome is what most of the people like the best.

Looks like the opportunities there in *** are very exciting and the ideas in your mind are overwhelming. If I were you, I may want to be more focused, and try to secure some small but unambiguous wins in a short time frame. This will make professional career there later much easier, and helps to build people's confidence in you and pave the way for buy-in of more risky initiatives in the future.

Best regards,

Young