One important thing I try to remember when making development decisions is to always try and keep options open. I want to commit to my technology choices as late as possible in the design process. One big technology choice is the choice of persistent store to use for a microservice. There is a lot of choice in this area from the style of store; Relational, object, document, graph, to the specific technology; Oracle, mysql, mongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB. The choices go on!

During my time as a the team lead of a SOA team my views on how integrations are built has continually evolved and changed. I am exposed to ideas through colleagues, online, at community events, through books and via experience. Every now and again I am asked a question in a meeting and I know the answer but I don't know how to do it justice with an explanation without going away and thinking it through. I am going to try and use this post to organise my thoughts and prepare for the next meeting!

We're doing a Snaplogic proof of concept and the UI is quite pretty so I thought I would write some blog posts about it. This will make a break from the normal boring badly spelled content I publish! Snaplogic works very well with JSON data in its pipelines but the integrations that we need to build make heavy use of XML. One solution is to use the XML Parser snap which will convert the XML into JSON. Unfortunately, the XML Parser failed for the first pipeline we tried in our POC!