Pipelines more than an architectural style/pattern

Every morning when I wake up, I thank god for the new day, my health, the family and for the pipeline architectural style!!

Pipelines (PL) provide enormous flexibility, Loosely coupled systems, policy, security and logging reinforcement and lot more. Pipelines allow to process the "data-in-flow" in an orderly fashion, and by applying an strategy based on pure "Separation of Concerns".

Modules plugged into the PL, are highly cohesive and loosely coupled, so if one of them is removed, upgraded or changed, the others keep working transparently. This is a very convenient pattern when data processing needs to be performed "on the fly". Because of its flexibility and modularity, every component in the PL watches the "data-in-flow" for some specific patterns (pattern recognition PATREC), in order to process, transform, change, adapt just the corresponding part the component is aware of (see the picture below).

PLs also allow to dynamically extend and change, existent behaviors by just de-registering/registering modules. PLs best practices along with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and ESB platforms, offer a promising future for business models looking for a "LEGO-Like" support on new products, that will reduce drastically the T2M.

LEGO-Like Business Models (the new challenge)

Nowdays, business challenges require a more dynamic response to the increasingly demanding client and market requirements. These requirements are ultimately oriented to QoS (quality of service), collaboration, intelligent search, social web, information ubiquity and many things more.

Modern and visionary companies, should be prepared for these more exquisite and exigent crowd of cybernetic clients, that uses a more specialized criteria to analyze and select amongst a myriad of information and service providers.

Legacy companies should stop and watch their overall picture, and map themselves on the current technology scenario to create a strategy oriented to make the necessary changes and adaptations to their Enterprise Technology Stack (ETS), in order to face and survive the forthcoming challenges. Fortunately, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy, brings a light into the darkness to solve this kind of uncertainty to many companies.

The following picture, depicts a possible ETS model:

The middleware ESB, provides business flexibility and agility required to adapt to those new requirements and business models, by providing transparent binding and modification of business rules and processes. It also provides full support for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), IT Governance, SOA Federation, Policy Reinforcement, Cross Security, QoS and lot more.

Web Applications will consume business rules and processes published on the ESB, so reinforcement of policies and security issues are delegated to this layer. This business logic is always ready to use and can be dynamically updated, changed and registered, so virtual services will keep working according to their original service level agreements, and applications will take advantage of the changing rules and processes, as business needs and consumers demand new marketing strategies.