Firm to field metadata repository supporting, SOA, WOA, Java and more

Let’s face it, on one level, service-oriented design is an effort to smooth over complexity. Wrapped in the service or at the other end of the service call is some rough hewn software artifact. Finding information about those artifacts is still like hunt-and-peck typing. So much for smooth sailing… Continued »

Aggregate services across multiple cloud domains

Cloud computing and SOA governance provider, Vordel released a new product for aggregating and managing multi-domain services at the VordelWorld conference in Dublin, Ireland this week.

The Vordel Cloud Service Broker (CSB) aggregates services from multiple domains including private, public and community clouds. The CSB registers the services from all three domains into a single repository, which the company says will simplify management, monitoring and policy enforcement. The CSB also includes features for caching, acceleration, analysis and transformation.

The major piece of the CSB is the Multi-Domain Registry Repository (MDDR), which aggregates the services across domains. The MDDR registers services from public cloud offerings from vendors like Amazon and Google along side users’ own on-premises systems so they can be dealt with from a central point.

Glassfish NetBeans highlights

by Rob Barry

Though Oracle has lately worked to quell concerns that it might dump support for Sun Microsystem’s GlassFish application server and NetBeans IDE, many still feel doubtful that any legitimate resources will back the open source tools.

In a discussion on TheServerSide.com, some saw Oracle’s message as perhaps a small comfort rather than a great reassurance. Continued »

As Oracle swallows Sun, MySQL, NetBeans and Glassfish not in danger

Since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in April, much speculation has surfaced about the enterprise software giant’s commitment to MySQL, NetBeans and Glassfish. At Oracle Open World in October, CEO Larry Ellison tried to quell concerns on both fronts, all each were critical to Oracle’s future.

“If anything, we’re going to invest more in MySQL,” Ellison said at the conference keynote. “Not less.”

Furthering these sentiments, Oracle has released a number of statements and, recently, a FAQ stating the company’s position across many of its major divisions and aquisitions.

In the FAQ, Oracle said Sun’s open-source Java application server, Glassfish, is far from in any danger.

Oracle plans to continue evolving GlassFish Enterprise Server, delivering it as the open source reference implementation (RI) of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specifications, and actively supporting the large GlassFish community. Additionally, Oracle plans to invest in aligning common infrastructure components and innovations from Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server to benefit both Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server customers.

 

As for NetBeans, the company reaffirmed both JDeveloper’s position as Fusion Middleware’s main development tool and the open source tool’s availability should customers prefer it.

Also in the FAQ, Oracle stated its position on MySQL in the same Vein as its chief.

“Oracle plans to spend more money developing MySQL than Sun does now,” the FAQ stated.

The company also said it plans to add open-source MySQL to its existing suite of database products.

Weirder science: Hadoop and computational biology

Before there was cloud computing, there was grid computing. Instead of sending your jobs to the cloud, you’d send them to the grid. Instead of provisioning big banks of on-premise computers to do your calculations, you’d send them to the grid.

Virtualization, services and ever cheaper hardware paved the way from grid to cloud. It may be too early to say, but cloud does seem to be a bit of a better play for a wider variety of jobs. Part of the reason grid didn’t get too far off the mark was that its poster stories were usually scientific applications…something of a niche.

Still, it is interesting to conjecture on how science  -  both big and small science – will be done on the cloud. Relational data bases are a tried and true way of dealing with data, scientific and other. The cloud at this point is highly influenced by Google’s flatter MapReduce/Hadoop ways of handling data. Still, Amazon just augmented its SimpleDB with a straightahead RDB (MySQL).

Some view on the nature of that possible transformation of science data and cloud this we comes via Michael Schatz.  For the biology community, moving to MapReduce/Hadoop-style architecture would be a challenging undertaking. SOAP and XML made some serious inroads there. Schatz is working on adapting important bioinformatics tools to the cloud paradigm. He has discussed the issues on SourceForge where he documents some project work. Check out Haddop for Computational Biology.

C++ for SOA in WSO2’s new Web Services Framework

This week WSO2 announced a release of its Web Services Framework for C++. This will allow developers to integrate existing C++ applications and SOA infrastructures with the company’s open-source framework.

Some of the features include the Codegen Plug-in Wizard for Eclipse, sport for the WS-* stack, SOAP messaging for Web services and clients and a host of supported platforms.

More on WSF/C++

Amazon brings MySQL to AWS, enhancing relational database offerings

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has just added support for a cloud-based MySQL database, called Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), giving developers an alternative to its own SimpleDB inside EC2. Also, the price of Linux EC2 instances will drop 15% as of November 1.

The company says this does not signify a change in direction for AWS but an increase in options available to developers. This may appeal to developers who would like a cloud-based MySQL database that is managed externally.

“In the database crowd there is no one-size-fits-all option,” Adam Selipsky, VP of AWS told SearchSOA.com. “Some customers want to run something that’s not like MySQL but actually is MySQL.”

From Amazon’s release:

Amazon RDS provides a fully featured MySQL database, so the code, applications, and tools that developers use today with their existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. The service automatically handles common database administration tasks such as setup and provisioning, patch management, and backup - storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. Customers also have the flexibility to scale the compute and storage resources associated with their database instance through a simple API call.

Goodbye VSTS: Microsoft team development enters new phase

by Jack Vaughan

Word of the next version of Visual Studio brought as well the news that Microsoft was planning to offer its core Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server product to all Visual Studio users.

This appears to end the divergence of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System. In its own terms, Microsoft has ‘’simplified the product lineup” for Visual Studio 2010. There are three basic versions expected: VS 2010 Ultimate, VS 2010 Premium and VS Professional. All are offered along with MSDN services. Visual Team Foundation Server is offered with all VS versions. But the server version of Visual Studio known as Visual Studio Team system is going away. Continued »

Entity Framework talks to Oracle data

Two big industry players whose paths cross in strange ways are Microsoft and Oracle. They may support each others tools and data bases, but they don’t always keep the course as different products go into different revs.

A recent example of this is the ADO.NET Entity Framework… Continued »

New SOA Manifesto walks the middle road

by Rob Barry

A group of SOA experts released a SOA Manifesto on Oct. 23, which sets out in 106 words the principles they feel are most important to the popular integration strategy. While some may think of SOA as something like Enterprise Architecture, and others, agile development, the SOA manifesto walks a middle road.

Several industry thought-leaders have signed the document, including Grady Booch, Toufic Boubez, Thomas Erl and Anne Thomas Manes.

The manifesto frames SOA as something that should focus on business objectives while remaining agile and interoperable. Some of the major priorities it lays out are:

• Business value over technical strategy
• Shared services over specific-purpose implementations
• Flexibility over optimization
• Evolutionary refinement over pursuit of initial perfection

This is all very reminiscent of the Agile Manifesto, which hit the scene in 2001. It sets forward a basic set choices between conflicting principals.

The lines in the sand have been drawn. What do you think? Leave us a comment.