Santosh Benjamin

BTS Diary II - 1 : A brand new project

Well, the old project is nearly coming to an end and I've moved on to another one. This time its really big and proper SOA, EAI whatever you like to call these things. 30 or so legacy systems to integrate with long running processes and so on and its going to last for a couple of years at least. Of course, we aint going in for a big bang approach but a set of several phases. The first phase goes live in July and consists of building the core processes and applications that are going to be used by all others. For instance, we have a CRM system to be integrated with a Customer Data Index. All the services we build to wrap these will be used for the future processes.

I've learnt a lot from the Biztalk community (especially the gang on the MSDN - Biztalk General group) and I hope to be able to help some others now ,having got one failry decent sized project under my belt and in this blog I'll share some of the architecture and patterns I will be using for the forthcoming project.

I'd like to start by recommending an excellent book i've picked up namely Software Systems Architecture by Nick Rozanski and Eoin woods. It goes into the practical aspects of producing an Architecture Description (AD) document using a set of viewpoints and perspectives and helps communicate cross cutting concerns like security. I like the way it presents the pitfalls of various models and when each should and shouldnt be used. They also give checklists to ensure that there is consistency across all the models and views, which in my experience so far is the most difficult thing (ie) keeping your models accurate and relevant across the projects phases and making sure that elements dont get lost when mapping one view to another.

The book has already paid for itself with the first few chapters (such as the Functional Viewpoint) giving me a great kickstart in my AD. For all the architects out there, i'd sincerely recommend you check the book out. Happy reading and developing. Watch this space. Theres plenty more to come.