Working on our encryption service that is deployed on an appliance. Bluedog's lead developer has come up with a nifty hash plug-in. The question remains, how difficult is it to enable others to use the service?
posted by Tom Termini at 10/10/2006

As we know, web services, and SOA in particular, represents an approach to distributed software that provides an abstraction that exposes business functionality as abstracted services that are both location independent and discoverable, possibly even on the intenet. Two considerations to application security should be considered. Primarily, the identity mechanism and policies might vary among legacy or back-office systems. Users might have different passwords and privileges for each system, so when users access a composite service, they may still need to be authenticated to each back-end system. Of course, Single Sign On is meant to address this.

Also, because the service layer acts as a mask of the details of the underlying technology implementation from the users, each service abstracts the user identity context as well. Connecting the particular users to overall functionality can be problematic, as SOA itself provides no overall security context. That is why we emphasize architecting with security (and single-sign-on) in mind.
posted by Tom Termini at 10/10/2006

Read about Bluedog's project management application (tool) for earned value management, CMMI and ISO9001 certification, and agile development. It's called Workbench, and is a J2EE web application written in WebObjects.

Earned Value Management (EVM) is a project management approach that tracks physical accomplishment of a project in progress. EVM has the unique ability to combine measurements of technical performance, schedule, and cost aspects (in other words, are we under or over budget) within a single integrated methodology.

Bluedog's Workbench was written to support Government CIOs and CTOs in the portfolio management approach to guiding enterprise architecture and on-going project development.
posted by Tom Termini at 9/08/2006

When using WebObjects for web services, it's a good idea to read up as much as possible on the tricks and techniques.
posted by Tom Termini at 8/08/2006

Bluedog recently completed a project for the FTC, doing a technology refresh. Check out this recent article.

Interesting, especially the part about Agile married to government SDLC.
posted by Tom Termini at 8/08/2006

What is the web service platform? The basic platform is XML plus HTTP. HTTP is a ubiquitous protocol, running practically everywhere on the Internet. XML provides a metalanguage in which you can write specialized languages to express complex interactions between clients and services or between components of a composite service. Behind the web server, the XML message gets converted to a middleware request and the results converted back to XML.

Bluedog (located at this place is one of the best WebObjects development firms around, and the biggest in Washington DC.
posted by Tom Termini at 7/18/2006