Columns

What's on your mind?

• By Michael Alexander
• May 1, 2005

Have you checked out www.ADTmag.com lately? We’ve added three blogs. “Enterprise Insider” is written by Jason Halla, an enterprise J2EE architect at a Fortune 500 company in Indianapolis, and moderator of Devshed’s popular Java, PHP and XML forums. “AppSide” is written by Matt Stephens, a senior architect, programmer, project leader and co-author of two books on extreme programming. The big idea behind our third blog, “ADTitude,” is to give us (ADT and its readers) an opportunity to share ideas and opinions about whatever’s on your mind.

Tony Baer pitched us a story about Web services security that we found appealing. As Baer notes in his story, which can be found here, Web services blur the boundaries between networks, software and data by making access dynamic and interaction among applications far less predictable. As a result, access control becomes far more complex as applications are exposed as services over a network.

Part of the problem is that Web services are still evolving as are the commonly accepted rules for making sure everything works well together. That’s the premise in a companion article, beginning here, by Alan Joch. In some cases, specifications exist to guide the low-level interactions of two services, Joch writes. Other times, the rules have loftier goals—creating an environment where far-flung services can track each other down and become part of a larger business process, all without their creators ever interacting or even anticipating that their services might one day have reason to work together.

One of our regular contributors, Stephen Swoyer, provides us with an update on business rules management systems. Proponents cite the ability of business rules engines to solve many different business problems, and note the majority of business processes haven’t yet been automated or even documented. Put it all together, and before long, business users will control their own code. Not surprising, programmers aren’t buying it, at least not yet. You can pick up the rest of the story here.

I spent a week on France’s Cote d’Azur not long ago. I was in Cannes to attend the annual 3GSM Congress. A lot of discussion in panel sessions and on the exhibit floor focused on using wireless handhelds like PDAs and smartphones to access corporate apps. More people carry cell phones than any other device, so it’s inevitable your users will eventually start lobbying for access to backend apps, writes Johanna Ambrosio in her story beginning here.