Synergy Centre holds 1 lunchtime and 1 breakfast seminar every month for startups and SMEs. We were invited to talk about SaaS applications on 10th of August.

Here is the presentation of saas-lifecycle. Send me mail if you want to know more about:

• how new features kill your applications and why
• why scalability planning is important from the start of the project
• why relaying on existing software / frameworks isn’t always the best solution
• why applications are rewritten every 3-5 years
• how we make web apps the way users like it

Seems topic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) wasn’t as popular as previous ones at Dublin ALT.NET so there was only 15 people attending. Only 1 person in room had experience with it and few others have heard about it. It seemed pretty complicated and was hard to get my head around it.

Following paragraph is my summary of what I understood from the evening. Please correct me if I’m wrong at some points.

As I understood ESB is message layer that communicates between components within enterprise system. There are asynchronous ESB listening processes that handle each message request and distribute them. It is good for scaling, but ESB integration needs big money investment, constant monitoring and it has large learning curve. This is one of the reasons it’s not usually implemented in small systems / small organisations.

You can read more about ESB at Wikipedia or buy a book about it

It is quite comon mistake in web development that people do not test scalability and as more users start using system, it actually breaks. Here is quick PDF to show you all you need to know about scalability and how to deal with it: agiletech.ie/scale