Posts Tagged ‘architecture’

Apps

Sunday, July 31st, 2011

Never heard anyone about this, but it seems to me that we have moved back to client-server architectures in the case of mobile devices. Or at least to thick clients instead of thin clients like web sites. Where there are web sites to do all sorts of things on a laptop you often need to download an app for a mobile device. And often you have to pay a small amount. So what used to be a free web site on a laptop is now frequently a payed application on an iPhone… Good business model though.

What about java and developing platform independent applications with thin clients? Is it really impossible to run all those apps as a web site in a browser? And what about the code in those apps? What does it do that I don’t know of with my data? And suddenly it is no problem anymore that you have to develop a different version of an app for every type of mobile operating system? You need money for that and it seems to be coming from people paying for apps.

**searching Google**

Seems that Taptu agrees with me.

See here for pro’s and cons for web site vs. apps.

TOGAF 9 Certified

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

Yesterday I took the TOGAF 9 certification exam… today I received an e-mail… I passed! Check out my name showing here.

Architecture Framework

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

Being the structure and order junkie that I am, I am delighted that after following IBM’s architecture curriculum, I now have a chance to do the TOGAF 9 training. Already the first day of this 5-day training we have lots of reading to do (The total TOGAF specification is about 700 pages! Not all of it equally relevant.), but I have rarely done a training that is so related to my daily job as this one. It provides loads of structure for my job and I can feel the pennies dropping like a jukebox on a saturday night in the sixties!

Tonight part of the reading was about setting up an architecture capability in an organization. Something we are currently in the middle of. That helps for learning as well, because I do not have to think long for examples.

ArchiMate

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

I have been modeling application landscapes in the ArchiMate language and think it is a vehicle you should consider to use when you are an IT architect. It offers a good toolbox of enterprise architecture concepts and a set of rules on how to stick them together. You can try it out with the open source Archi tool, which offers all basic functionality to work with ArchiMate. There are other more extensive and expensive ArchiMate tools, to be found on the ArchiMate site. Archi works fine for me up to this point however.

I use Archi mainly for “IT geography”, laying down my “IT archaeology” findings in an applications map. Extending the applications map with a processes map and thus linking the process and application levels of your enterprise architecture is also possible. Further down the architecture stack you can also model and relate to the technological situation.

The maps are very useful in communication. A picture really says more than a thousand words and I can get to the point quickly in discussions about which architecture pattern or mechanism to use to solve a particular architecture issue. ArchiMate also helps to get the ambiguities out of the discussion. Because the maps can be understood by both business and IT (if not then maybe they should not join the discussion at all…) and because it is a formal language, it leaves little room for interpreting the situation differently. I can be reasonably certain that everybody understands each other and that the risk of surprises in working out the described solution is small.

I still have to investigate how products made in the ArchiMate language relate to process and architecture modeling in Aris. IDS Scheer does offer a tool, ArchiMate Modeler, that combines Aris and ArchiMate, but unfortunately it is not open source.