Laurence Moroney

For many businesses, the Web storefront is the only point of contact for customers, and for others it's a major one. As such, it's important that this architecture meets the needs of your business, not just from a technology point of view but from a strategic one. No business likes to have an important asset be vulnerable to the whims of a particular vendor, and this is particularly true of a technology asset. As you probably know in IT there are two broad options that can implement your business needs: the Microsoft family of Windows and .NET products, and the open standards community. The Microsoft option is compelling given the Visual Studio.NET development tools that are so incredibly productive in implementing software - and this is key in the success of the .NET framework. However, if you use Microsoft you're locked into a single vendor and potentially exposed ... (more)

Getting Started with Silverlight: Zero to Hero

Lots of people have been asking about how to get started with Silverlight, and what they need to do to get up and running with Silverlight quickly. Inspired by blog posts such as Jesse Liberty's, I'm going to take this from first principles, with no prior knowledge assumed. Over the series, we'll look at the following: Your First Silverlight Application Understanding XAML Understanding the Blend series of Products Building Silverlight applications using Aptana on the Mac Building Silverlight applications using Visual Studio Express on the PC Programming Silverlight 1.0 with JavaS... (more)

Integration: Not Just Aggregation

When talking about enterprise application integration, we tend to think of using Web services technologies such as SOAP and UDDI to virtualize a data model across a large enterprise. The thinking is that with a consistent interface, the data stores of the company can be abstracted behind a Web services layer and reported in XML, which can then be kneaded to the particular needs of your application. In an ideal world, this would be simple. However, we don't live in an ideal world, so there are a number of problems. The first problem is that we often want to take data from one ser... (more)

Running ASP.NET Applications on WebLogic Easier Than You May Think!

When WLDJ wanted someone to take a First Look at Visual MainWin for J2EE, we turned to interoperability expert Laurence Moroney - coauthor of a forthcoming book on Web services security and a senior architect in a major financial services house in New York City. In the course of assessing the product, Laurence in fact became more and more involved - in the end, on a staff basis - with the company behind it, Mainsoft. So this First Look should be read with that basic journalistic disclosure in mind. When WebLogic workshop was first conceived and presented to the public, it was do... (more)

SOA Web Services And Best Practices For .NET WebSphere Interoperability

Mixed-mode deployments where the data center has a mixture of different technology platforms, hardware, and software and where those platforms interoperate together to deliver software applications is the norm rather than an exception. Experience shows that it's a challenge getting applications to run across a diverse array of software and hardware platforms with acceptable availability, performance, scalability, and security. As such, several methodologies and standards of integration or interoperability have evolved, the most common being Web Services, which despite their powe... (more)