Strategic IT Architecture

I don’t often address the deep technologies that enable the IT strategies that are the normal topic of this blog. However, very often the failures associated with even the most compelling and sound leading-edge strategies – particularly those that are enabled by a new technology evolution — are due to poor practices in the use of the underlying tools.

I know…we’ve all recognized for years now that Service Oriented Architecture is not “about” technology. It’s an architecture and design paradigm that can be implemented in many ways, with many tools. But underlying that truth is the hard fact that it does, in fact, require technology to actually make it work. Although definitely not a requirement for SOA, enterprise service bus (ESB) tools are one of the most-commonly used mechanisms for establishing a loosely-coupled service-based platform.

So I took note of this announcement from Open Source vendor MuleSoft about a new component that offers support for one key SOA best-practice – loose coupling.

Loose Coupling

Those of you who leverage Open Source solutions and who have implemented, or are planning to implement, a services-based platform, probably already know about the Mule ESB. I’ve just seen the new Mule Data Integrator (http://bit.ly/44WWWk) for (what else?) data mapping, transformation and integration.

All too often, we’re forced by expediency to couple our data models and transformations too tightly – using XSLT and/or custom code. This new component from Mule integrates with Eclipse to provide a graphical transformation mapping interface. (I like the one-to-many mapping feature.) And it deploys as a native Mule service.

I haven’t used the new Data Integrator yet, but it looks like an excellent addition to the product stack that will enable more strategically robust use of the ESB as a backbone for loosely-coupled services.