Presentation: Tweet"XML Is Great, But I'd Rather Be Coding..."

The financial services world, like many other verticals, is rife with disparate data standards and heterogeneous systems architectures into which the enterprise Java developer is typically thrust with no clear brief, tight deadlines, and even tighter budgets. Management lip-service will have been paid to agile development practices, with the CFO-office vultures circling all the while, insisting on total predictability and reliability of project estimates and timelines. Building applications that can cope with the complexity and scale of both external and internal integration demands can seem a challenge too far under such constraints.

XML is a well-worn, but failed, mitigation strategy that has helped focus attention on data organisation, but from one perspective is just a standard way of being non-standard and in many cases is part of the problem. Happily, tools and techniques exist to help the beleaguered developer navigate these murky waters and concentrate on the areas where he or she can properly utilise hard-won skills and experience, adding value as opposed to spending months mired in arcane message specifications and arguing the toss with 10 different vendors and their rigid APIs. Steve Miller, Product Director, C24 and COO, Incept5, will walk through real-world case studies where the right combination of tools, technologies and architectural approach have allowed developers to develop, without disappearing into Integration Hell.