“Federation” is a term that has been floating around the modern parlance of enterprise architecture and integration for a long while, but with the flood of interest in cloud computing, it is back in the spotlight. For many organizations, choosing a federation platform with open standards is important, and for many of those same organizations, the open source platform is preferable. This article walks IT decision makers through the technical landscape, and gives a fundamental overview of the marketplace of solutions available today.

As promised in my last post, following are ten steps for successful implementation of "Tomcat First" strategy within an enterprise.

"Tomcat First" is part of a guest blog series I am doing for OpenLogic. In my previous article, Open Source in the Enterprise: A Shift in Prevailing Views, I discussed the changing enterprise use case for Free & Open Source Software (FOSS). In that blog piece, I posited that the use case for FOSS in the enterprise has changed, and that this change is attributable to three important factors:

This is the third and final part of my Apache Clustering blog series. In part one, An In-Depth Look at Tomcat's Clustering Mechanisms, we discussed what a cluster is and why your enterprise should cluster. Part two, An Enterprise Tomcat Clustering Guide, was a little more hands-on and it covered the different cluster setups. It also covered how to choose the best setup for your organization. Part three, Designing an Efficient, Reliable and Productive Application Server Cluster, is going to teach you how to create a simple cluster. This blog is not a step-by-step tutorial on cluster creation, but we will provide you with the tools you can use to implement a cluster rapidly and effectively.