Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Posts tagged architecture
Data Integriteit anno 2011 – Hands-on met Toon Koppelaars en RuleGen 3.0 bij AMIS op dinsdag 27 september
Sep 22nd
datum: dinsdag 27 september; 16.30 uur
locatie: AMIS, Edisonbaan 15, Nieuwegein
sprekers: Toon Koppelaars en Lucas Jellema
Het belang van data integriteit behoeft geen toelichting – als het goed is. Vrijwel iedere enterprise applicatie is gebouwd op het fundament van een database. Robuustheid van die database en absolute betrouwbaarheid van de gegevens daarin zijn. essentieel. Het garanderen van die integriteit en robuustheid is lang niet altijd goed geregeld – en is ook geen triviale uitdaging.
De veelheid van toegangskanalen tot de database – batch jobs, web services, web applicaties in Java en .NET, PL/SQL modules en natuurlijk TOAD voor de applicatie beheerder – maakt wel duidelijk dat de integriteitsregels voor de data ofwel de business rules niet in de applicaties of in een service bus (alleen) kunnen worden geïmplementeerd. Integriteit in moderne applicatie-landschappen kan alleen worden gegarandeerd met implementatie van de business rules in de database zelf.
De Oracle database biedt naast de integrity constraints voor primary, unique en foreign keys weliswaar een veelheid aan mechanismen en constructies maar geen concrete, eenduidige, robuuste en efficiënte manier om business rules te implementeren. RuleGen is een framework dat optimaal gebruik maakt van wat Oracle 10g en 11g aan mechanismes biedt om te komen tot consistente en waterdichte afdwinging van de business rules. De uitvoering van de rules is efficiënt. Op run time kunnen rules gemonitord worden, in ‘log only mode’ draaien en zowel op statement- als transactie-level worden afgedwongen. De analyse en ontwikkeling van business rules wordt door RuleGen met een to-the-point user interface ondersteund die ontwikkelaars laat concentreren op de essentie ipv op het loodgieterswerk.
“RuleGen zou je kunnen beschouwen als de natuurlijke opvolger van CDM RuleFrame dat eind vorige eeuw door Oracle Nederland werd gelanceerd – een verbeterde uitvoering die de database slimmer benut” – aldus Lucas Jellema, CTO van AMIS en ooit de grondlegger van CDM RuleFrame.
In deze workshop wordt RuleGen geïntroduceerd. Read the rest of this entry »
Agile software development, the principles. Principle 11: The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Dec 14th
This is the eleventh of 12 posts about the principles of agile software development. Purpose is to go back to the start of the agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) and discuss the implementation of the 12 principles in real life software engineering. Goals of agility are to go deliver software of higher quality, faster, with a higher acceptance to end-users and able to follow the changing business requirements to strive for competitive advantage.
The question is: is this going to work in practice or is this only based on a nice marketing and sales story.
Principle 11: The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
For a long time the engineering expertise (and also software engineering) was based upon the condition that you worked with specialists. These specialists emerged from the principle of division of labour and made it possible for these specialists to focus their attention on their specialism and create the best solution within their field of expertise. The Interaction designer designed a user interface, the architect created a global systems model, developers created code and infrastructure specialists created the necessary environment to run the application on.
Everyone was specialized and delivered the best solution within their capabilities. However when all these components where put together, noting worked. It is an illusion that specialists can design and foresee everything beforehand.
Within agile projects the solution is to use a self organizing team to perform these tasks. This team may consist of specialist, but this is not a requirement. The requirement of this team is that they work together and self-organize all aspects of the systems to be delivered. This team is permitted to make errors and invent their solutions, provided that they deliver and evaluate frequently (retrospective) and learn from their successes (and errors).
Agile software development, the principles. Principle 9 : Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility
Dec 28th
This is the ninth of 12 posts about the principles of agile software development. Purpose is to go back to the start of the agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) and discuss the implementation of the 12 principles in real life software engineering. Goals of agility are to go deliver software of higher quality, faster, with a higher acceptance to end-users and able to follow the changing business requirements to strive for competitive advantage.
The question is: is this going to work in practice or is this only based on a nice marketing and sales story.
Principle 9: Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
The first time I looked at this principle I thought: “How is this possible”. Agility focuses on quickly delivering working software (reading: “Quick and dirty”). I experienced this is not true. Attention to technical excellence is making the agile process working better. Technical excellence can make the development process more flexible. In this context I would like to point out that there is a difference between technical excellence / good design compared to complex design and technical complexity. How many developers, designers and architects (the ivory tower / PowerPoint architects) cannot resist creating complex designs, patterns and code with no other purpose than to show off their technical superiority? How many projects have stranded in complex designs and abstract meta-models without creating any business value? These projects are good to be displayed in the Museum Of Modern Software Development but completely useless in the real world.
Smart technology and smart design
Every developer, architect and designer must work with principles of smart design in their minds. In my opinion there are only two principles: 1) the concept must work and 2) other team members understand and are able apply the principle.
Smart technology and good design has its greatest advantage when it is used for the benefit of the whole application and the whole team. Not just for sub-optimal improvements for a single function or a single developer. Good excellent technology and good design has to make coding easy and the application modular, more flexible and adaptable. By using the right frameworks and supporting tools you are able to deliver higher quality software much faster than you where used to. In practice this means using frameworks for common tasks like authorization, persistence and navigation and tools for building, releasing and deploying your application.
In fact all tasks, that are labor intensive and demand a lot of concentration and focus, are likely candidates to be implemented via frameworks and tools.
