UML is a well-established notation for the design of object-oriented applications. In component detailed design meetings people are comfortable describing a design and articulating issues using UML.  This is not the case in integration projects. I go in the meetings to review an integration solution and invariably the discussion is based on a Power Point presentation with diagrams that include very basic, ad-hoc notations. The picture on the right is an example; the diagram mixes the component model with the deployment model, using ad-hoc notations for the components and execution environments.

Why is that? Why UML is not used more often in integration projects?

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From time to time I read about an interesting Java project and would like to try it.  For example Apache Jackrabbit, a library implementing JSR 170 (Java Content Repository). But setting up the my Java environment to run the examples is a hassle because of the many libraries required. Over time I got better at starting new projects: I have project snapshots that contain all the Eclipse and Ant artifacts for a simple application with proper JUnit tests and logging. Still, downloading all required libraries in the proper directories and updating Ant and Eclipse configuration is a drag. There must be a better way to do it other than downloading manually libraries from various sites. In this context I decided to try  Apache Ivy with the recently released version 2.0.0.

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Over the years I built a number of tools that can be used for the synchronization of reference data. They are now available in a toolkit:

• XML schemas for events that are generated when an entity is changes (added, modified or deleted);
• tools to synchronize two systems based on: SQL, flat-file and XML data source/targets)
• instrumentation of existing applications to generate events when data changes:
  • event tables populated by the application on a change
  • web-service invocation
• pre-defined auditing and logging capabilities for data synchronization. User interface to access the audit/log.

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