Weblogging has been pretty thin for me lately, as has everything else. for the past few months now I've been working on a large XML-driven integration project at Sun Microsystems. I consult as a data architect to the group that drives the main www.sun.com Web site, as well as product marketing pages and other data-driven venues. That's been a large part of my day job for the last four years, and in the most recent project Sun is working in a versatile new e-commerce engine. They put a lot of care into analysis for integrating this into existing product pages, so I found myself waist deep in XML pipeline architecture and data flows from numerous source systems (some XML, some ERP, some CMS and every other TLA you can fathom). The XML pipeline aggregates the sources according to a formal data model, the result of which feeds normalized XML data into the commerce back end. A veritable enterprise mash-up. It's been a lot of work, leavened by collaboration with a top-notch team, and with the launch last week of the new system I've found palpable reward.
Web Usability guru Martin Hardee, whose team put together the stringent design parameters for the project, mentioned the new feature this week.
We're already off building on this success, and it's more enterprise-grade (yeah, buzzword, sue me) XML modeling and pipeline-driven architecture with a global flavor for a good while to come, I expect. And probably not all that much time for Weblogging.