ZapThink on Ulitzer

Your CIO is all fired up about moving your legacy inventory management app to the Cloud. Lower capital costs! Dynamic provisioning! Outsourced infrastructure! So you get out your shoehorn, provision some storage and virtual machine instances, and forklift the whole mess into the stratosphere. (OK, there's more to it than that, but bear with me.) Everything seems to work at first. But then the real test comes: the Holiday season, when you do most of your online business. You breathe a sigh of relief as your Cloud provider seamlessly scales up to meet the spikes in demand. But then your boss calls, irate. Turns out customers are swamping the call center with complaints of failed transactions. You frantically dive into the log files and diagnostic reports to see what the problem is. Apparently, the database has not been keeping an accurate count of your inventory-which... (more)

The Role of Policy in SOA Governance

The original goal of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) concept was to build flexible, loosely coupled systems. But any two components in a system that communicate with each other are coupled to a certain extent. As architects, our aim in deploying real world SOAs is to lessen that coupling between components. That means removing or lessening the runtime dependencies between them. These two tenets of SOA, however, loose coupling and distributed resources, are a double-edged sword: along with the potential for much greater IT flexibility and business agility, they bring the p... (more)

Macrovision White Paper Showcases Digital Entertainment Media

Opportunities to leverage entertainment metadata are expanding dramatically and creating differentiators for the companies that deliver consumer experiences. Metadata follows you wherever you go: on your home TV, computers and game consoles; when you watch a movie on the train; when you listen to music in the park; or when you play a CD in your car. These experiences can be enriched by entertainment metadata. This white paper examines how Macrovision delivers visually rich and descriptive entertainment metadata from TV Guide and AMG to drive consumer engagement, purchasing, and ... (more)

The Concrete Abstraction of the Business Service

It may come as a surprise to our long-term readers that even after seven years of talking about Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), ZapThink still has something novel and interesting to say about what a Service truly is. But in fact, although we define the term repeatedly for business, technical, and mixed audiences, there are still some subtleties to the definition that underscore the fundamental nature of the Service abstraction, and they also underscore the connection between that abstraction and some of the infrastructure choices Service-oriented architects ... (more)

How I Became a REST 'Convert'

Many of you know me as one half of the ZapThink team – an advisor, analyst, sometimes-trainer, and pundit that has been focused on XML, web services, service oriented architecture (SOA), and now cloud computing over the past decade or so. Some you may also know that immediately prior to starting ZapThink I was one of the original members of the UDDI Advisory Group back in 2000 when I was with ChannelWave, and I also sat on a number of standards bodies including RosettaNet, ebXML, and CPExchange initiatives. Furthermore, as part of the ZapThink team, I tracked the various WS-* sta... (more)