[[ OK, I am writing this with tongue-in-cheek, which for anyone not familiar with that term, means “not really serious”!!! ]]
Funny thing happened today on the ESB project that I’m on….
After a day of hard work, solving some really tough technical challenges (the kind that makes your head throb, your eyes glaze over and make you think that becoming a carpenter could be a smart career move), I leaned back in my chair and surveyed the landscape (my desk). A piece of tattered paper caught my eye, the piece of paper the team had been using all day long to describe concepts, flow and “you are here” type information to ourselves. But, I saw it as if I was seeing it for the first time, and I was struck by what it had evolved into. Then I noticed that it was actually just the latest diagram in a series (we had no white board in that room). The first one was crisp, and not marked up, and on a relatively small piece of paper (could have been a cocktail napkin). All the others in the series (there were three more leading up to the final one) were progressively more marked-up, scribbled on, and tattered, and all on A4 size paper. So, I though I would share with you that vital piece of paper that some very bright people spent the day with. And, I’m not sure what happened to that bottom-left corner.
This my friends, is actually the architecture of a very cool world-class, country-scale ESB. It solves ALL problems associated with ESB and SOA architecture. It is a comprehensive solution that also even layers on end-to-end governance. We have intermediaries, bus services, generic on-ramps, SLA enforcement, itinerary repository… we have it all. In fact, if you have ANY questions about how all these things fit together, it’s probably clearly explained in this diagram. This, in all its blazing glory, is real-world goodness I just had to share, for the benefit of the community.
Although this could be confidential in nature, I felt I was pretty safe posting it on my blog as the intellectual property is pretty much naturally protected. To the untrained eye, this looks like, well, I’m not sure what it would look like, probably just an unintelligible mess. But to us, it’s pure gold, and the roadmap to success. Enjoy!!!
And no, I will NOT do a webcast to explain it. Tomorrow is a whole new day, and, who knows, maybe even worthy of a fresh piece of paper. This, however, is perhaps one of the finest pieces of “software architecture art” in existance 🙂