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September 15, 2003
Event Driven Business
In an event driven business, products are built to order, not built to stock, reducing inventory carrying costs and allowing greater customer satisfaction as a result of customization. This article from ebizQ has a great analogy:
If you want the train to move over one foot, you have to do an immense amount of work tearing up and re-laying tracks. On the other hand, all you need to do to turn the more agile truck is move the steering wheel.
Historically, we've been better at laying tracks in IT that we've been at designing roads. The Internet is probably a counter example. Its flexibility has been its greatest strength. The article, entitled "SOA It Goes: The Agile Enterprise Goes Mainstream," talks about the relationship between event driven businesses and event driven IT. With Web services, we're trying to recreate the flexibility of the Internet in every application. That's a tall order. Perhaps the best line in the article, for me, was this one:
[E]vent-driven, service-oriented architectures integrate three kinds of data: reference data, such as the number of trucks in a fleet; state data, such as the number of trucks under repair; and event data, such as a delivery being completed.
I'm not sure why it stood out, but, it seems to be a useful taxonomy. I'd be interested in hearing if others have used this or a similar taxonomy to classify data in an architecture and what benefits there were.
Reading the article, an another I found at the same site while I was researching SOA performance monitoring, led me to wonder about the tie in between the Iteration Real-Time reporting suite I reviewd a few weeks ago in InfoWorld and Web services. While not specifically sold as a Web services monitoring tool, it could easily be tailored to that end and would provide some interesting visualizations.
10:01 PM | Recommend This | Print This
A Noble Experiment: Free PDF Downloads of EJB Books
In a noble experiment in the economy of the Net, three books on J2EE and EJBs are available for downloading on The Server Side. The three books are:
- J2EE and XML Development by Kurt Gabrick and Dave Weiss
- Mastering Enterprise Java Beans Second Edition by Ed Roman
- EJB Design Patterns by Floyd Marinescu
Of course, the authors hope that you'll buy the book since most people prefer printed books to PDF and its more expensive to print it than to buy it. They're offering the complete book in PDF format as, essentially, advertising. This is apparently Ed Roman's idea. He did the same thing with the first edition of his book. I own that copy and found it to be a great book on EJBs. Since he's doing it again, he must have had a positive experience the first time around. Note: you will have to register with The Server Side to download the books.
03:53 PM | Recommend This | Print This
I'm Blushing---Really!
Adam Gaffin, of Network World Fusion, has placed me on his list of top ten bloggers. I was surprised to be among such august company.
03:23 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Online Zines and Blogs
CNET News.com has redesigned their site and incorporated blogs, of a sort, into the design. The site features six main areas of focus and a weblog, they call the "journals," for each one. For example, here's the Web Services Journal. I was disappointed when I found them. There's some issues like no permalink and no clear indication who's writing the weblog, but more importantly, they have a sterile, corporate voice. Seems like all they done is collected editorials into one spot and called it a blog. No RSS feed either.
In related news, according to Bruce Sterling, Wired magazine will also incorporate weblogs, but they haven't shown up yet. Fast Company also has a blog which, as far as voice is concerned, is a little better the ones at news.com, but still has more of a bulletin board feel than that of a true blog. At least there's an RSS feed.
Update: I had a short, pleasant exchange with Heath Row who is one of the writers of the Fast Company weblog---it helped clarify my thinking. I was probably too specific to the Fast Company weblog. I typically find blogs that are written by more than one person to difficult to connect with sometimes. They need some time to develop a personality which is usually immediately present in a one-person blog. They tend to feel more like a bulletin board with multiple people posting and then others responding in comments. Doesn't mean that they're not useful, just that they have a different style.
I think you have to work harder in a multi-person blog, particularly one that is affiliated with some other media concern, not to just sound like a collection of repurposed stories. I think it easier to do if the participants each keep a separate blog and then someone aggregates selected stories from them. Some would object to this "editing" and say that it would ruin the nature of the blog, but in fact, I see it as an honest kind of editing where value is being added to the original content by giving it context and putting it in place with other interesting stories. The originals are still available for those who wish to read purely.
08:01 AM | Recommend This | Print This
PDF Resources
I found a site called Planet PDF, with a good collection of PDF information and tools. I learned a few things poking around.