IT Architectures and Middleware Strategies

Britton provides Information Technology professionals--who wish to rise above the conflicts of new business objectives, vendor wars and new technologies--with a guide to thinking clearly about the real challenges IT faces. He also includes coverage of middleware technology alternatives and distributed systems and the best practices in IT architecture.

Chris Britton is an independent consultant, specializing in IT architecture. He has worked in IT for the last twenty-seven years doing a variety of jobs—programming, technical support, system software design, program management, technical consultancy, and even marketing. More recently he has been spending his time developing an IT modeling tool.

Peter Bye has had a long career in IT as a programmer, analyst, and project manager, focusing on telecommunications, transaction processing, and distributed systems. Currently a system architect for Unisys Corporation, his experience includes work in software development centers and field projects around the world. Peter is a contributor to international standards in systems management, the author of a number of papers on middleware and other IT topics, and a frequent speaker at conferences and other events.

List of Figures	p. xv
List of Boxes	p. xix
Preface	p. xxi
Acknowledgments	p. xxvii
The Nature of the Problem	p. 1
Example: Moving to e-business	p. 1
What is IT architecture?	p. 5
Why is it different from what we did before?	p. 7
The IT architecture approach	p. 9
Alternatives	p. 11
Why not surround?	p. 11
Packages	p. 13
How do we get there?	p. 13
Rewrite	p. 13
Evolution	p. 15
Bringing the techies and modelers together	p. 17
Conclusions	p. 18
A Short History of Middleware Technology--From the Stone Age to Message Queuing	p. 19
Early days	p. 19
Preliminaries	p. 23
Remote procedure calls (RPC)	p. 25
Remote database access	p. 27
Distributed transaction processing	p. 30
Message queuing	p. 34
Message queuing vs. distributed transaction processing	p. 36
What happened to all this technology?	p. 39
A Short History of Middleware Technology--Object Middleware	p. 41
Object-oriented concepts	p. 42
Object middleware concepts	p. 49
Object middleware technologies--DCOM and CORBA	p. 52
Using object interfaces	p. 56
Conclusions	p. 58
A Short History of Middleware Technology--Components and the Web	p. 61
Internet applications	p. 62
Transactional component middleware	p. 66
COM+	p. 69
EJB	p. 70
The issues of state	p. 71
Conclusions	p. 73
Middleware Classification and Middleware Architectures	p. 75
Middleware elements	p. 75
Networking and interoperability	p. 76
The programmatic interface	p. 77
Server control	p. 77
System administration infrastructure	p. 78
A technical classification of middleware?	p. 78
What is communicating?	p. 78
How they communicate	p. 80
What is the interface?	p. 83
Classifying middleware from technological principles	p. 84
Vendor architectures	p. 84
Positioning	p. 87
Strawman for user target architecture	p. 88
Marketing	p. 88
Implicit architectures	p. 89
Conclusions	p. 90
What Is Middleware For?	p. 91
Support for business processes	p. 92
Transactional, real-time	p. 94
Transactional, deferrable	p. 95
Information retrieval	p. 96
Collaboration	p. 97
The presentation layer	p. 98
The transaction server layer	p. 100
The data layer	p. 101
A generic functional architecture	p. 103
Mediators	p. 105
Conclusions	p. 106
Resiliency	p. 107
Using backup servers	p. 108
Detecting failure	p. 108
Clean-up work in progress	p. 110
Activating the application	p. 110
Reprocessing "lost" messages	p. 113
Dual active	p. 114
Applying resiliency techniques in practice	p. 118
System software failure	p. 119
Planned downtime	p. 120
Application software failure	p. 121
Developing a resiliency strategy	p. 123
Conclusions	p. 125
Performance and Scalability	p. 127
The un-slippery slope	p. 128
Transaction processing	p. 131
Object interfaces	p. 133
Transactional component containers	p. 135
Two-phase commit	p. 135
Message queuing	p. 136
Using remote database access for real-time transactions	p. 137
Conclusions on real time	p. 139
Batch	p. 139
Is distribution an alternative?	p. 140
Load balancing	p. 141
Business intelligence systems	p. 143
Ad-hoc database queries	p. 143
Data replication	p. 144
Backups and recovery	p. 144
Design for scalability and performance	p. 146
Conclusions	p. 147
Security and Systems Management	p. 151
Systems management technology	p. 151
Security technology	p. 156
Building application security	p. 161
Circumventing security	p. 163
Handling internal security violations	p. 165
Existing applications	p. 165
Application support for systems management and security	p. 166
Conclusions	p. 168
Implementation Design and Components	p. 171
Some general comments on design	p. 171
Implementation design	p. 178
The presentation layer	p. 178
Mapping business objects to implementation objects	p. 179
Grouping objects into components	p. 181
Making reuse work	p. 182
Completing the implementation design	p. 187
Conclusions	p. 188
Implementing Business Processes	p. 191
What is a process?	p. 193
Business processes	p. 196
The alternative view--functional analysis	p. 197
Information and processes	p. 199
Processes and computer applications	p. 202
Business rules	p. 202
Real time vs. deferrable	p. 203
Data distribution	p. 203
Long transactions	p. 204
Generic business processes	p. 206
Batch	p. 206
Business process flexibility	p. 206
Conclusions	p. 207
Information Access and Information Accuracy	p. 211
Information access	p. 211
Basic process information	p. 214
Process management	p. 215
Process improvement	p. 216
Customer view	p. 216
Marketing and strategic business analysis	p. 216
Summary of requirements for information access	p. 217
Information accuracy	p. 218
Shared data or controlled duplication	p. 220
Shared data	p. 220
Controlled duplication	p. 222
Hybrid strategy	p. 224
Creating consistency in existing databases	p. 224
The technical problem	p. 226
The data migration problem	p. 227
The business process problem	p. 227
The information controller	p. 228
Conclusions	p. 229
Change--Integration	p. 231
Creating a presentation layer	p. 234
Screen-scraping task	p. 235
Interface size mismatch	p. 235
Turning existing applications into transaction servers	p. 236
Wrapping	p. 238
Building a middle tier	p. 239
Business processing change with new interfaces	p. 240
Changing the middleware between transaction servers	p. 243
Runtime integration products	p. 244
Extensible markup language (XML)	p. 246
Conclusions	p. 247
Change--Flexibility	p. 249
Understanding large applications	p. 251
Airline example	p. 252
Bank example	p. 256
Batch	p. 261
Conclusions	p. 265
Building an IT Architecture	p. 267
Integrated applications architecture	p. 268
Business process design	p. 270
Managing information	p. 273
The organizational and project management context	p. 274
Understanding existing systems	p. 276
Business process change design	p. 277
Application functional design	p. 277
Implementation design	p. 277
Implementation--coding	p. 278
Implementation--testing	p. 279
Deployment	p. 280
Project management	p. 280
Breaking down the barriers	p. 282
The future	p. 283
Index	p. 285
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IT Architectures and Middleware Strategies for Building Large, Integrated Systems

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