In case you missed them, two stories last week emphasized a disturbing truth about the continuing Global Cyberwar. First, foreign hackers compromised the Government of South Carolina, stealing data from
As I’ve discussed before in this blog, REST is an architectural style for building distributed hypermedia applications much more than a way to simplify APIs. Essentially, REST takes the idea
Clustering has been an important tool in the IT architect’s tool belt for many years now. Put a group of servers or storage together on a LAN, add some well-planned
Organizations worldwide are eyeing their existing data centers and wondering what it would take to turn them (or some part of them) into Private Clouds. Install virtualization? Check. Are we
OpenStack is an open source Cloud platform effort that brings together hundreds of contributors, primarily from large and small software vendors. Founded by Rackspace and NASA, OpenStack is now starting
In part one of this article, I discussed how REST separates two different kinds of state information: resource state and application state. Resource state is stored in the persistence layer,
ZapThink has long bemoaned the fact that the big middleware vendors co-opted the SOA story, turning it into an excuse to sell middleware. Even though there’s a better understanding of
Call me a cynic. After working as an industry analyst, first for IDC covering online retail, and then for ZapThink covering the Web Services and SOA markets, it’s easy to
You want to integrate two disparate pieces of software, so you set up message interactions between them. You hammer out a common data format for the messages. You poke and