Point Solutions

I was looking at understanding what a Point Solution meant and came across this post by Fred Wilson, a VC. From his post, I understood that a Point Solution was aimed at addressing a specific problem rather than acting as an end to end solution. Google is a classic example of a point solution providing search capabilities. Though it provides other services, it is not integrated like Yahoo! is. To elaborate further, though Blogger is part of Google, the registration for using Blogger is independent of the registration required to use GMail, whereas Yahoo! is a portal, offering services customized for each user.

While many people like the concept of a portal as an end to end solution, there are others that would only like to take only how much they can chew. As Fred notes in his post, web sites with simple independent services such as del.icio.us that offer bookmark management are point solutions that are very popular.

IASA

I stumbled across the website of IASA - International Association of Software Architects. One of their primary tasks is standardizing the role of a Software Architect and they are compiling a taxonomy to that effect. Initially, I did not think much about it but when I read that Grady Booch was on their board of advisors, I went ahead and registered. Their website is in beta and registration is a pain, I had to enter the confirmation code several times before getting myself successfully registered. But it is still a good idea to register yourself as there seem to be a quite a few things planned.

Integration Choices: Interactive vs. Non-Interactive

A colleague of mine had a question on when a user interface (UI) would need to be provided to invoke a business service vs. using a database trigger to do the same. According to me,

• When the business pattern is Self Service i.e. the user wants to query the status of an order or place a claim (interactive), a UI would be most appropriate. In other words, whenever there is an interaction between a user and a system/application.
• When the business pattern is Application Integration i.e. synchronization between multiple databases or legacy systems or batch driven updates (non-interactive), a database trigger could be chosen. In simpler terms, whenever there is interaction among applications/systems rather than users and applications.

SOA - Can we see some real projects please?

It is been over 4 months since my first brush with SOA. I am now beginning to wonder if there are any real SOA projects being implemented at all. By real SOA projects, I do not mean pilots or proof of concepts (POC) or projects that have been existing pre-SOA and rebranded SOA compliant with a few Web Services thrown in. Rather I am looking at projects that have been started from scratch with SOA as the base. Unfortunately, I have not seen any real world implementations of SOA and have begun to doubt if there will ever be a SOA project.