Suppose you have a string composed of messages which are fixed in length. However, you do not know for certain how many messages there are in the string. You need to take this string and unpack it into a list of repeating elements where each element represents one message.

How do you do this? BusinessWorks’ built in Parse activities will not help you because you do not know in advance how many messages there are in the package.

Let’s do it! Read on »

I’ve read a lot about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). I’m still not clear on some of the concepts that should be followed if one wishes to say that they are doing SOA. In this series of articles I aim to explain what SOA is all about and then moving on to some concrete examples of how working with SOA baffles me.

To put it short, SOA is a design approach which is aimed at achieving loose coupling between interacting software components. There are two important design limitations which are imposed:

• employing a set of transparent interfaces acceptable for all of the components
• using these interfaces to transport minimal and descriptive messages described by an extensable schema

But what exactly does this mean and how does it work in real life?

Technorati Tags: soa, service oriented architecture, design, programming, technology, theory

Read on »

Hey! I noticed in the logs that a lot of you seem to be looking for my old web software. BinClock, Form2Mail, Advanced OnUnload and the Popup Manager.

I’ve now made them available through one of the pages.

If you find them usefull, feel free to drop me an e-mail. Unfortunately, I’m no longer supporting or developing these scripts so enjoy them if they work.

I’ve stumbled upon an article on a blog about Tibco RV vs Tibco EMS. It’s a short review of how RV and EMS compare. Some of the shortcomings that have been mentioned in the article are not really valid, yet there are others that should, I think, be addressed. Read on »

There are several ways one can collate two data sets in BusinessWorks. Supposing that they have some 1-n relationship, you could either do it by using iteration groups or by letting XPath do it for you.

Which approach is better? Let’s find out! Read on »