Archive for September, 2008

Are your RFPs "green"?

Posted by Shahid N. Shah in Methodologies & Frameworks, Regulations & Guidance on September 23rd, 2008

Reducing energy consumption for IT (”greening”) is a major cost containment issue — something we’ll need to do in the times of budget cuts that are probably on the way. One key to achieving “green” in IT is the green request for proposal (RFP). The government should be driving energy efficiency in desktop and data center environments and use the RFP process to gain energy efficiency as part of their green IT goals. OMB hasn’t really mandated any “green IT goals” yet but I think they’re coming, especially if there’s a Democrat administration on the way (but even if it’s McCain).

Using RFPs is valuable for IT and it signals which areas the government might intend to push its vendors in the future. Commercial and Federal buyers should seek progressive energy efficiencies and cleaner manufacturing processes by pushing green across suppliers.

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The State of the Scripting Universe

Posted by Shahid N. Shah in Uncategorized on September 5th, 2008

As architects we’re routinely asked about the “best tool for the job.” More and more these days the answer is a scripting language like Perl or Ruby — and, without a wink or cringing about it. Even as little as ten years ago those of us who liked scripting languages only recommended it for small utilities or daily script work — however, more and more these days scripting languages are being used to deliver entire services in a SOA or WOA environment and even build complete applications. I still think that scripting is for specialized domain-specific uses but others believe that scripting can be used for general-purpose use cases, too.

Check out this CIO Magazine article “PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Tcl Today: The State of the Scripting Universe“. It’s got some good content and thoughts from the creators or managers of the projects that the scripting languages come from.

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Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) succeeding SOA?

Posted by Shahid N. Shah in SOA on September 4th, 2008

Many service-oriented architecture (SOA) efforts in the government and elsewhere are not getting off the ground quickly enough to be worth the ROI. They are falling prey to the same problems as other top down, centrally driven projects that SOA was meant to solve and promises that were made.

Large complicated solutions are always harder to implement and put into place versus smaller, simpler projects. This is probably why new web-oriented architecture (WOA) efforts are seeing the light of day. Because they are smaller, use RESTful capabilities built into HTTP, and can be enabled in existing web applications with minor alterations.

Instead of designing solutions around higher-level business services (like in SOA) the WOA approach is to create simple resources that serve up some useful data. The WOA approach is faster, more agile, and probably more immediately useful but does have the drawback of not being a “business service” as much as a collection of data or other resources. Of course, many of the business services that architects think they are creating are also just lookup services.

So, the question is — is WOA succeeding SOA? Are any of you doing anything for WOA or are the reports of SOA failures over hyped?

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