Jack van Hoof

Jack van Hoof's Blog Everything is moving toward on-demand business where service providers react to impulses - events - from the environment. To excel in a competitive market a high level of autonomy is required, including the freedom to select the appropriate supporting IT-systems. The world is preparing for network oriented business structures with independent autonomous service providers and service consumers. Organizations tend to change their structure frequently. The evolving focus on service orientation and globalization will enforce this trend. The world is preparing for network oriented business structures with independent autonomous service providers and service consumers. Parts of the business process will be outsourced to external partners. Departments and business units are transformed to service providers. These service providers no longer focus only ... (more)

SOA Viewpoint: Layers are Encapsulations and Tiers Are Barriers

Jack van Hoof's Blog I came across an interesting article of Arnon Rotem-Gal-OZ about the (mis)use of the layered architecture style. I found it an interesting article, although I have an essentially different view. I think the model of layers and tiers is a services model. As it is a services model to me, I view the model of layers and tiers as a logical model. The services are physically delivered by components; ultimately one service by one component. So the counterpart of the logical services model is a physical component model, that needs not necessarily map one-to-one to th... (more)

SOA, BPM and DFD and the Art of Designing Systems

Jack van Hoof's Blog Living in the era of SOA and BPM, I come across a lot of books, articles and blogs that try to tell me how wonderful the world can be. When using a BPM-tool you are able to model and manage the business processes of your company. Flexibility is the keyword. Not only cutting and pasting on a canvas, but also copying to fulfill the popular "reuse" paradigm. Of course these tools are nothing more than pencil and paper. The art of designing systems is quite another matter. The books, articles and blogs of these days don't tell you very much about the art of designi... (more)

SOA Viewpoint: How To Mediate Semantics in an EDA

Jack van Hoof's Blog Systems that pass data to each other share commonly understood semantics. Explicit data semantics is the key to success in an EDA (and any other messaging system). In striving for loose coupling, data semantics is the ultimate level; when systems are decoupled at the semantic level - e.g. they don't share semantics - the coupling becomes useless, because in this case the systems will not be able to communicate at a logical level. Shared semantics is a prerequisite in connecting distinct systems, no matter whether it concerns EDA, SOA or any other form of EAI ... (more)