# Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture is all about the decisions you make and not what
technology you buy. Unfortunately, this message is largly lost on the
many vendors that want to sell you Enterprise Service Bus products or
other such *SOA in a box*.

Successful enterprise architecture design begins with a mindset before
the first product is purchased or the first line of code is written.
Most importantly, this mindset must filter down to your team as a design
culture.

## Best Practices

Well-designed enterprise architectures rely on fundamentals:

### Interoperability

Applications and systems must communicate with
each other. They must exchange data using common (or standard) data
formats and representations. The must communicate using
well-established protocols. Above all, specifying and interface via an
implementation is an easy trap to fall into, especially if the
schedule is not on your side (is it ever?). Force your organization to
write wrappers that normalize data formats and interfaces into the
common patterns on which you have decided.

### Loose Coupling

A good enterprise architecture depends on systems *working together* and not
*depending* on each other. Everything should be a black-box. If your design has
phrases such as *system A requires system B* or *system X calls system Y*, then
rethink your architecture. Data should flow between applications in your system
- perhaps orchestrated by some entity - but not subject to inter-application or
inter-system depencendies.

### Technology-Neutral Designs

A decade ago when EJBs were all the rage, presenting a bean as a public
interface was considered acceptable. Now it is pathalogical. Having system
interfaces depend on a particular technology (or worse, a particular
programming language) is the fasted way to ensure that your application will
become shelfware before it is ever adopted.

### Vendor-Neutral Designs

This one tends to sneak up on folks. You go about using a product that claims
to be standards-compliant but ends up deviating from the specifications in
subtle (and sometimes no so subtle) ways. A while back, BEA's WebLogic didn't
care about the order of elements in web application configuration files. Guess
what - JBoss did. Validating the configuration file against a schema would have
caught this but relying on a product to validate your system is never a good
idea.

## The LynxBridge Approach

Good enterprise architectures start with good ideas. Let us come in and do a
white board session where we can listen to your pain points and guide your
organization to a healthy enterprise architecture that will provide lasting
service and extensiblity.