Eric Newcomer

Eric Newcomer's Blog I am as guilty of this as anyone else. Back in the 90s I was on a big project to standardize enterprise software. We wrote a few papers about it, and a chapter in a book. We often used the "Henry Ford" analogy, which relates to the impact standards for interchangable parts had on hard goods manufacturing. The Henry Ford analogy says that the hard job in mass assembly is getting the interchangeable parts standardized - thereafter creating the moving assembly line is the easy job. Ford pulled it off with the significant market success of the Model-T and changed the world. In the original story (which the link directly above summarizes), the crucial quote for us was:"The key to mass production wasn't the continuously moving assembly line, as many peopl... (more)

Thinking in Services: Why Successful SOA Requires a New Way of Thinking

"SOA is all about an approach to IT—a design encompassing all IT assets, and the design has to be mapped to technology. Historically, companies used CORBA or messaging systems such as WebSphere MQ to implement their SOA designs. Today, the preferred SOA infrastructure software is Web services based, including ESBs. This presentation will help attendees begin thinking in services, l... (more)

More on the Software Assembly Question

Eric Newcomer's Blog Since I wrote this article questioning the validity of the Henry Ford analogy for improving software productivity through interface standardization, there's been some good posts by Hal Hildebrand and Richard Nicholson, and some good feedback at SYS-CON.com too. While I have to say I think the posts and comments make excellent points about the value of design, and the d... (more)

SOA World - Abstraction and Control in REST vs RPC

Eric Newcomer's Blog One of the biggest debates in the software industry is about getting the level of abstraction right. By this I mean a level of interaction with computers higher than binary code or machine language - in other words, anything that presents humans with a more natural or intuitive abstraction of a CPU's instruction set and binary data storage format. Computers are after... (more)

The Integration Challenge

In the early days of business computing, little attention was paid to the concept of sharing application logic and data across multiple machines. The big question faced by an organization was how to develop computer systems to successfully automate previously manual operations such as billing, accounting, payroll, and order management. Solving any one of these individual problems was cha... (more)