John Crupi

Enterprises trying to improve business unit productivity and the reuse of IT assets continue to struggle. IT organizations have achieved some success by attacking these challenges with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), but in most cases have still only exposed small portions of the overall IT service portfolio. Much of this struggle has been to deliver a "just enough" SOA to the business unit to improve its ability to build applications and features to get to market faster, better, and cheaper. And as we've learned, accomplishing this is easier said than done. The fact is that SOA is middleware - and middleware traditionally relies on more middleware to translate data into a consumer-friendly state. It's certainly a major disappointment when you finally get your SOA right only to find that building a composite application requires using a portal (middleware) and... (more)

Implementing SOA Without Enterprise Mashups? You Might As Well Kiss Your Job Goodbye!

John Crupi's Blog Ok, ok, it's an overstatement. But the ROI of SOA is difficult, at best, to define and measure. Have you noticed that the press and blogosphere is filled with SOA implementers/analysts discussing the ROI of SOA and the idea that stand-alone SOA efforts are DOA? For a small snapshot of this teacup tempest, look no further than the recent commentary from SOA expert David Linthicum, the Nucleus Report on SOA ROI, and the subsequent commentary from ZDNet's Joe McKendrick and IT advisors Neil Macehiter and Neil Ward-Dutton. While these experts differ on issues like th... (more)

What's Out and What's In for Knowledge Workers in 2008

Some of us are ready for the Web 2.0 wave that is now breaking over us, and some of us are not. The McKinsey Quarterly just put out an insightful article, “Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch” (registration required), that outlines eight unique business trends that will be enabled by the Web 2.0 technology wave. With apologies to the guys at McKinsey for oversimplifying their detailed work, here’s my brief synopsis of their ‘Big 8’: McKinsey’s Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch ‘Distributing co-creation’: Let everyone in your supply chain create. ‘Using consumers a... (more)

Core J2EE Patterns

Welcome to the first installment of the "Core J2EE Patterns" column by the Sun Java Center (www.sun.com/service/sunps/jdc). Every other month, we (Deepak Alur, Danny Malks, myself, and other architects from the Sun Java Center) will discuss various topics from our book, Core J2EE Patterns, Best Practices and Strategies (Alur, Crupi, Malks, Prentice Hall/Sun Press, 2001). These topics include each of the 15 J2EE patterns in our catalog, design strategies, bad practices, refactorings and pattern-driven design in the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Applying the Technolo... (more)

Sun Distinguished Engineer John Crupi On SOA and Kitchen Renovation

We're in the process of renovating our kitchen. In our kitchen design, we're actually constructing a new structure to extend the current kitchen. If any of you have gone through this, I'm sure you have lots of war stories. But, as my wife and I go through this process,  I keep seeing similarities between renovating a kitchen and building a SOA.  To understand what I'm talking about,  I'll start by making some role comparisons: Kitchen Renovation Roles SOA Roles Home Owner Business Manager Kitchen Designer Business Analyst Building Architect SOA Architect Construction Crew Developme... (more)