I had the opportunity to give a talk last Wednesday night at VanDev Meetup (Vancouver’s Software Developer Network). Here is a quick summary of it.

In this talk, I have presented a few criteria to help developers and architects decide between using ready-made EAI tools versus custom built solutions. I have discussed the identification of contexts, patterns, topologies and decision factors that can help favor one approach or the other.

If you’re hesitating between walking the ad hoc coding path or the integration tool path for your integration projects, then keep reading as the following may help you.

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Developers are interesting creatures – curiosity and the urge to explore are their second nature. The way it goes today (until quantum computers replace everything ) we still need to share our findings in some way, which happens to be a code repository. For years, Mule has been using Subversion (and CVS before that), and today there are new kids on the block fighting for our attention. While we aren’t yet ready to make a full switch (infrastructure tools need to mature, non-developers need some training, etc.), we’re happy to play with Git. Lucky us, they came up with a way to marry two worlds, which gives Subversion a ‘lease extension’.

This post describes a workflow which worked quite nicely for us. Who knows, maybe it helps your organization keep developers happy, while preserving sysadmin’s good night sleep too? Post your findings in the comments. (more…)

Recently, while working with Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, an opportunity came up for us at MuleSoft to take on open-source community work to improve the Ubuntu Tomcat 6 package. Having spent several years administering the most popular Tomcat Internet Relay Chat channel, I’ve gathered lots of feedback from Tomcat users about what they had difficulty with, and the changes I had to offer turned into implementation work.
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The new stable release of Tomcat 6.0.24 represents six months of open source software development. Version 6.0.24 includes a small number of new features, plus a large amount of important bug fixes and enhancements. This release is an incremental bug fix release, but the number of fixes included in this release is high. (more…)

ObjectWatch has put out a report titled The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity. They estimate that we are losing $500 billion per month in IT failures. That’s a scary number. If this rate of failure continues, business confidence in IT will diminish.

A couple of points in the report caught my eye, as they are applicable to the points we have been discussing over the last several months.

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At MuleSoft we use Agile development to build and deliver all of our software products. One of the more challenging and potentially time consuming part of agile is story estimating. Recently we decided to take a new approach to this that has proven to be a lot of fun and amazingly accurate. I call it Bubble Sort Estimation. (more…)

I often get questions about how to tune Tomcat for better performance.  It is usually best to answer this only after first spending some time understanding the installation of Tomcat, the web site’s traffic level, and the web applications that it runs.  But, there are some general performance tips that apply regardless of these important details.  In general, Tomcat performs better when you:

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Every so often, I would be answering some questions about Tomcat, and the person I’m speaking with would ask “where’s your blog?” or “do you have a blog somewhere?”  I have always cringed at that question because I didn’t have one — until now.  Mainly I had a few clever excuses for not putting time into a blog of my own: (more…)

Trying to get budget from the C-level in these economic times can be difficult, but integration and SOA initiatives are still very much alive and need to move forward. Check out this blog post and conversation on ebizQ to consider whether “’Guerrilla SOA’ is a realistic option when the CEO doesn’t approve your budget.” (more…)

We have been running Galaxy successfully on our in-house servers and laptops for demo purposes for some time now and decided that having a running image of Galaxy on Amazon’s EC2 was the next logical step. Galaxy in the cloud gives us the opportunity to expose a running instance to a much wider audience than might otherwise interact directly with the product. (more…)