Matthew Ford Kern

I have recieved some questions about my history with integration technologies over the years, so here are some remarks about various waves of integration techniques and methods, and my use of them:

• APPC, EDI, Workflow and MOM:  With Integration on the internet begore the Web:  You could only build a client/server or centralized database system just so big.  Connecting between these islands required asynchronous messages like those in EDI.  IBM came up with an API for those synchronous messages called APPC, and others followed.  You moved those asynchronous messages over "message oriented middleware" or MOM.  IBM merged that with their workflow environment and called it MQ series.  My involvement was first driven by document management and logistics systems.  I was a natural MOM proponent with my EE.communications background, and I ended up designng my own workflow system (several generations).  Later I was briefly the solution architect for another workflow vendor that was an OEM technology provider to several of the top B2B suppliers- essentialy EAI technology.  I ended up building a large number of small to very big systems using this generation of technology between 1987 and 1995.
• Web Services, SOA and WOA:  This is a big, current integration wave.  In the beginning there was GET and POST, who were later named REST.  Then there was SOAP, WSDL, USSI, and several security technologies.  These were called SOA, then much later the term SOA became the idea of implementing IT services but not tied to Web Services alone.  (See the new OASIS standard.)  Now it seems that REST outnumbers the other form of web services (WSDL, UDDI, WS*...) by something like 10::1, rates its own marketing term, and is now called WOA.  I guess WSDL, UDDI, WS* were additional complexity without enough benefit.  I was fascinated with Web Services initialy as a concept, as it makes the RPC paradigm (synchronous calls) work across the vast distances of the Internet- however there is still the availability equation and the limit on system composition using this paradigm so my enthusiasm has tempered.  Otherwise, the idea of implementing reusable "coarse grained" IT services (components)  is native to enterprise architecture and I remain deeply interested in that, although legacy service implementations far outnumber new service implementations.
• ESB and EAI:  This is another big, current integration wave that repackages the old technology and adds some XML as a native internal language.  EAI is essentialy workflow with some XML translation that connects with MOM.  An ESB is essentialy distributed EAI instead of a central EAI server, although to some EAI vendors it is simply a marketing term.  I have been a proponent of these technologies from the beginning, as it is mainly a repackaging of the workflow/MOM technology I used fro many big systems integration jobs.  The XML is the new part.  I am somewhat discouraged by the low level of expertise of some programmers trying to apply XML to message structures but who never studied communications theory or information theory, but these thihngs will work themselves out.  In the meantime, I see EA and EAI/ESB as tightly interconnected.