In total contrast to my personal values on marital relationships, I believe “loose coupling” quite often is the right design for enterprise application integration. Whereas humans have emotional and existential needs to function well, systems are happy with a well-defined contract of communication and does not care who is on the other end. It would make no difference if it was exchanged, as long as it lived up to the mutual contract. No need for life-long commitments here.
The other week I came across a four letter acronym, which got me perplexed for a moment – OOTB. In situations like this, my instinct is to ask the almighty and omniscient Wikipedia for the correct interpretation. The on-line oracle gave me two options: “Out of the box” or “Out of the blue”. Interestingly, both were relevant to the context at hand, which I thought was quite funny.
Sometimes the machine needs fixing, and it comes down to a human person to fix it. In this post, I will leave the amazing Star Trek world of incredible machines and devices from my previous post. I will also seek to find a way to approach an integration problem from a less technical perspective. After all, it is the supported business that is at risk when system integration fails. How can we effectively and efficiently track down our problem and set it straight?
“How can you demo that?” one of our sales executives exclaimed when I told him I was going to demonstrate our integration technology at a user group meeting. The point being that there is nothing to see – it just happens. And yes, when everything goes smoothly, it “just” happens. However, those of you who have worked with integration know that putting a robust solution in place is everything but trivial.
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