Launch of IMS related website

IMS is used at 95% of the Fortune 1000 companies and has been around for 40 years, yet IBM only recently announced Version 10.

Industry veteran Trevor Eddolls has launched a new web site for IMS technical people called Virtual IMS Connection, which is located at http://www.virtualims.com/. Trevor has more than 18 years of experience in mainframe related publications.

There doesn't seem to be very much by way of resources for IMS people and I'm hoping this new site will fill in the gaps. It's going to be a virtual user group. There's a discussion forum and a place for jobs and resumes. There is also links to news, articles, events, and other IMS-related resources.

SOA - The basics

SOA is not latest trend anymore. Companies all over the world has committed a significant IT budget for this.

SOA is basically a collection of services which communicate (via messaging) with each other. Fundamental principle behind SOA is Strong cohesion and Loose coupling. Coupling is about interdependence of one subsystem with other subsystems. Cohesion of a subsystem characterizes its internal interdependencies.

SOA is not only about web-services. A good SOA may be started by provisioning few services from existing mission critical legacy applications. Better to start small and think big.

Numerous books exist on SOA. Messaging solutions are critical to any SOA. I prefer starting with Enterprise Integration Patterns. A good place is www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com which discusses 65 patterns suggested by Hohpe and Woolf.

Some good place to visit for SOA -

http://www.service-architecture.com/web-services/articles/service-oriented_architecture_soa_definition.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture