Java Hair

Lately we’ve been doing a lot of discussing about how to reuse components within an ADF application over on the ADF Methodogy Google Group. A lot of interesting comments have been made and Avrom even blogged about some in his post about SOA without the S.

A lot of clients we talk to are interested in modernizing their applications but they don’t always realize that in order to modernize a client/server application in a large enterprise environment AND take advantage of the technology they want to move to, a lot of work is involved. Not just in the actual development, but in the planning and designing of the new application.

Sure, the simplest approach is to just convert what you have and go with that, and in a lot of cases, that is a good first step, but it doesn’t make sense to just convert what you have to end up with the same exact application in a different technology stack, the only thing that is going to buy you is different support costs, probably along with a bunch of flack from the business who’s paying for the change.

Many large enterprises have already created a stockpile of available enterprise services that are meant to be re-used by new applications. Make sure that part of your modernization project is to take a step back and analyze what existing services already exist and how they can be used in your modernized version of the application you are migrating or converting.

After you have analyzed existing services, take the time to determine what this applicaiton that is being converted can offfer as far as services.  Does it make sense to provide some of this data as a service to the enterprise?  Are other applications going to be converted that will want to make use of the same data?

So though the application you are looking at may seem quite isolated, chances are, if it is part of a larger infrastructure, it really isn’t all that isolated at all, it’s just that the old technology couldn’t support it any other way.

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