These machines are said to cope with complexity, one of the biggest hurdles to software integration today, by ”canning” known good integration configurations. As with a prefabricated house, there is room for customization, but the appliance may not meet the special needs of all integration developers.

Ease of integration is the basic raison d’etat  behind IBM’s PureSystems box, shown above. Integration has become such a tangle, that there is little doubt some shops will consider the box as a way to cope.  The path has been set for Big Blue shops by DataPower, the XML appliance that IBM acquired a number of years ago from start-up DataPower and took to market in a big way. For many IBM-oriented undertakings, ”DataPower” is almost synonymous with ”ESB.” Its utility was especially enhanced with the addition of object brokering and data caching capabilities.

If you’d like to see more of PureSystems and other doings at IBM Impact 2012 check out SearchSOA.com’s Impact 2012 in pictures slide show.

Some of these services are complete and in operation, while others are under development. All of them, unfortunately, are usually undergoing versioning.

The open source community has created mock services architectures to deal with this symptom of SOA. Too, vendors have fielded tools to deal with the new paradigm. ITKO (now a CA company) Parasoft, GreenHat (now an IBM company) and Hewlett-Packard Co. now support simulation of services. These are often called “virtualized services” as well.

While there is a certain natural solidity to enterprise back-end systems, the Web, with its constant change, is influencing the need for virtualized testing.

“People need to have an e-commerce experience that is extremely dynamic. Expectations change almost every week,” said Kelly Emo, director, Applications Product Marketing, HP. “This places demand on the developer team, and potentially, on the scalability and elasticity of back-end services.”

Application owners help drive the use of services virtualization tools, she noted, saying, “They see the costs in waiting and the problems that arise with limited testing.”

HP entered the virtualized services fray about a year ago, and has recently updated its HP Service Virtualization offering with support for REST services, now found widely in cloud and Web APIs. Native support is also available with this release for IBM WebSphere MQ services, which has been seeing a lot of demand, she said.

Cloud computing, too, is a driver of the move to virtualized services testing, according to Emo.

A number of elements of Web 2.0 - cloud services, open APIs and mobile apps - are becoming the means to drive a new form of SOA. This SOA is much more likely to use REST than SOAP. Services continue to underlie new IBM integration offerings. At Impact 2012, IBM rolled together some mobile services development tools, with its newly acquired Worklight mobile middleware platform forming something of a centerpiece. IBM also promoted the newly forming ecosystems of open APIs, announcing IBM WebSphere Cast Iron Live Web API services.

“Today SOA is about linking systems of record together. SOA is the core. It simply is just good design. Design principles like SOA are fundamental in allowing you to bring isolated silos together,” said IBM’s Wieck, discussing traditional SOA.  But Wieck is also watching new forms of SOA – ones that reach out to Web users and reach back to enterprise assets.

“New API services unleash your business to new users,” Wieck said.

Wieck’s boss, IBM Software Group leader Steve Mills, echoed her comments. He reminded, as he sometimes does, that core SOA concepts are not really new. “It’s good fundamental design,” he said. “Winding everything up into a big ball of twine is not a good idea. [But] modularity  … is an idea that has been with us for a very long time.”

Is the onslaught of RESTful APIs showing SOA the door? “What we are seeing today in a many ways is the logical extension of SOA – not something new and different from SOA,” responds Mills.

A financial industry technology leader on hand at Impact concurred that services-style thinking is a key to development today. “We have to get to this world where we are focused more on services rather than applications,” said Steve George, CIO, Huntington Bank. “Flexible SOA accelerates solution delivery.”

The move appears to be a return to its original roots, represented by its OpenEdge line. That operation is largely a channel business in which VARs and ISVs work with Progress platforms and tools to target specific vertical markets. That business, IT work formerly hosted in house, may be overtaken by cloud computing architectures, industry observers suggest.

In the early 2000s, Progress began to expand its software portfolio. It started a buying spree, eventually acquiring a series of best-of-breed software startups, including several SOA and XML specialists, with the intention to both enhance its OpenEdge line and sell point tools directly to enterprise software shops. The company included its Apama complex-event processing (CEP) products, which have found use in financial markets, as part of its core listing.  In today’s announcement, the company said that FY 2011 revenue for core products was $361 million, while non-core products represented $172 million.

The future course for Progress Software had been under review by its board since at least shortly before its Progress Revolution user conference last fall. At that time CEO Rick Reidy announced he would be stepping down. Late last year, Jay Bhatt, who previously headed a division of Autodesk, took over as president and CEO at Progress Software.

“It looks like Progress is set to do a 180 degree turn, and revisit its past to try and reinvent its future,” BPM expert analyst Neil Ward-Dutton wrote in a blog entry.

Ward-Dutton, principal and co-founder at MW Advisors, also voiced concern, suggesting the pipelines for the divested products could “dry up very soon indeed, as prospects focus instead on potential choices with clear futures.”

Although Ward-Dutton has concern for the company, a former employee, Danny Goodall, a founder of the Lustratus Research Limited, voiced his optimism in a blog post.

“I am pleased that Progress has looked at its DNA, mapped that to what the market needs and has tried to structure a company that can thrive in the cloud,” said Goodall. “For too long Progress forgot its core values and differentiators and instead aimed to ape other vendors.”

“Progress watched competitors in the integration space build out broad SOA portfolios and felt it should do the same,” chides Goodall. This worked for Oracle (which Goodall credits for a high-powered sales operation) but not for Progress, in Goodall’s opinion. -Jack Vaughan (Includes reporting by Ryan Punzalan)

Among scheduled keynoters was author Alexander Osterwalder, presenting on ”Business Models, IT, and Enterprise Information.”  In other recent presentations, Osterwalder, who co-wrote Business Model Generation (Wiley, 2010), has discussed the crucial role of enterprise architects in closing the divide between strategy and IT. The gap between the initial business model and the ultimate product should not deter technology strategists, he has indicated.

He told a Stanford University audience in February that while plans themselves can be worthless, planning itself is important. People usually think, he suggested, “the idea is the most important at the beginning, but it is the shape you give the idea, how you evolve the idea [that is most important].” Osterwalder was expected to expand on these notions and discuss his concept of the modeling ‘canvas’ at The Open Group’s Cannes event. His “Business Model Canvas” helps to define roles, activities, processes and resources among partners, with the goal of efficiently delivering useful products to customers.

A key focus of the conference was to offer real-world experience and advice about IT-operations collaboration for successful business transformation. Increasingly, organizations are bringing together IT with functional parts of the enterprise to ensure sustainable business change.

The agenda included talks on enterprise architecture, SOA, cloud computing and security. Harmen van den Berg, director at Netherlands-based BiZZdesign, discussed using business requirements management as a basis for quality enterprise architecture. Ed Harrington, principal consultant at Architecting the Enterprise, presented a tutorial on using The Open Group Architecture Forum (TOGAF) framework to architect SOA. And issues of cloud security—both now and in the future—were explored by The Open Group’s Vice President of security, Jim Hietala.

Other keynotes and mini-sessions ranged from updates on TOGAF, to predictions about the future of “big data” and discussions about process integration and the cloud. - Stephanie Mann and Jack Vaughan

Almost two years ago, Oracle launched its patent and copyright suit against Google, claiming the search giant illegally grabbed Java intellectual property when it created its Android mobile device software around Java. The case now faces a 12-member jury that will decide if Google violated Java programming copyrights that have been brought up by Oracle.  The first week of testimony showed that APIs specifically, like software techniques generally, are complicated - and contentious.

Forgoing a Java license saved vendors of Android Smartphones millions of dollars, but that could change if Oracle prevails in court. Oracle became steward of the Java standard when it purchased Java-originator Sun Microsystems in 2009.

Both Oracle and Google have been in front of a judge since Monday and will continue to do so for a projected 10 weeks. Negotiations preceded the trial, but ended with the two companies indicating that they were not close to any agreement. Google was willing to pay up to a few million dollars while Oracle demanded hundreds of millions. Early estimates put Oracle’s claims at over $6 billion, but, as parts of Oracle’s case were pared down running up to trial, estimates of Oracle’s potential takes have slid down under $1 billion.

Prior to the trial, Oracle’s contentions seemed to focus on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that hosts the Java language at run time. In the first week, the trial has focused on Java APIs. While there is some consensus that a computer language such as Java cannot be patented, Oracle contends that specific APIs using a language can be copyrighted.

Tech’s biggest “Larries” - Larry Ellison of Oracle and Larry Page - testified in the first week of the trial, along with Mark Reinhold, Oracle Java Platform Group chief architect, and Timothy Lindholm, Google engineer, and others. Both Reinhold and Lindolm were formerly with Sun.

According to Oracle-Google trial documents, Google is asserting that “computer programming languages are not copyrightable, and neither are Oracle’s APIs.” Google says that “the Court should hold that the structure, selection and organization of the APIs are un-copyrightable.”

In its own filing, Oracle maintains that the Java APIs in question required effort and time to build, and that they do come under copyright protection. The company’s latest statement states, “Copyright protection of a computer language is also consistent with the Copyright Act’s statutory purpose to ‘promote the creation and publication of free expression’ by rewarding authors.”

Java’s creation came somewhat before the advent of a popular open-source software movement. In its last days, Sun Microsystems tinkered with open source strategies for Java. An OpenJDK was embraced as part of that effort. In turn, Google used OpenJDK as part of its effort to create the Android platform for mobile applications.

The nature of APIs proved to be difficult to describe as the first week of the trial unfolded, as Oracle’s Reinhold sought to explain what has become a lynchpin of modern application integration. In an earlier computer era, APIs were usually proprietary, shared in the form of voluminous documentation, and shared often only as part of big, expensive corporate licensing deals. This has changed somewhat of late as Web giants like Twitter and Facebook have created “public APIs” that require no license.

Reached for comment via e-mail, software patent critic and software industry veteran Lou Mazzucchelli said, “Software patents should be abolished. Others are starting to wake up to this.”

“On the other hand,” he added, “if there is a clear copyright violation, that is a slightly different story.”

It is early in the trial and the outcome is uncertain, Mazzucchelli concludes. “Not much in this case seems to be clear, so far,” he says. - Ryan Punzalan and Jack Vaughan

What do you think? Are the people who pay for Java licenses being foolish?

”There’s a lot of room for raising awareness of SoaML. It’s not as well-known as it should be,” said long-time IBMer Lee Ackerman, now CTO and vice president of products, The Emphasys Group. Tools would help, he suggested.

And, in fact, Ackerman and his Emphasys colleagues have built a pattern-based add-on tool to IBM Rational Software Architect for WebSphere Software. The IBM modeling tool supports SoaML, but Emphasys looks to ease the implementation and improve SOA development outcomes via its Service-Oriented Architecture Design (SOAD) Model Accelerator add-on.

”With the Accelerator, we provide patterns and model restraints and reports that leverage information from [design] models,” said Ackerman, co-author of Patterns-Based Engineering (Addison-Wesley, 2010). Ackerman said the SOAD Model Accelerator helps a team decide what should be modeled and how. Embedded in the tool is knowledge of practical service identification patterns, which would be useful for what can often be a difficult task.

Modeling may always be disliked by some groups of hard-core coders, but UML verges on ‘mainstream’ in a fair number of enterprises.  The evolving mix of SOA, UML and SoaML is worth watching.

Is SOA itself mainstream? “If it’s not, it’s on the verge,” says Lee Ackerman. He says there are still newbies coming online to learn UML. Tools such as SOAD Model Accelerator, he suggests, can help experienced and new SOA users alike.   But SOA is more than tools.

“SOA is best practices. It is an approach. It is a mindset. Moreover, it is an architecture style. SOA really becomes a problem solver,” said Ackerman.

Is SOA complex? No, says Ackerman, but the problems it is being asked to address in the enterprise these days truly are complex, he said.- Jack Vaughan

SAP’s collaboration with Adobe, Appcelerator and Sencha will enable developers to effectively build mobile apps based on their choice of client architecture. Developers will be able to do so while leveraging a mobile application platform. The products involved in the agreement include Adobe PhoneGap, Appcelerator Titanium and Sencha Touch.

Adobe PhoneGap is a hybrid Web app runtime environment that allows developers to author native mobile applications with Web technologies such as HTML5. Applications built using PhoneGap have access to device APIs and can be published across major app stores.

Appcelerator Titanium is an Eclipse-based IDE, SDK and library of connectors used to build, test and
deploy mobile and Web applications. Titanium SDK is billed as enabling the deployment of native, hybrid and mobile Web apps all from a single JavaScript code base.

Meanwhile, Sencha Touch is an HTML5 mobile application framework. Sencha Touch includes built-in capabilities to make it easier to build applications that align with business architectures. The application framework also enables developers to build apps that work on multiple platforms such as iOS, Android and Blackberry.

Viewers suggest these boutique players represent  a cross-section of key open-source mobile tools today, and may come to effectively expand the developer base for SAP/Sybase mobile efforts. - Ryan Punzalan

Giuli, a technical expert at Ford Motor Company’s Research and Advanced Engineering organization, recently told EclipseCon 2012 attendees in Reston, Virg. about OpenXC platform.  It is, he said, a joint effort of automaker Ford and embedded tool maker Bug Labs. The OpenCX platform is intended to produce a standard way of connecting aftermarket software and hardware for cars and trucks.

OpenXC is an API to the car. It requires installation of hardware components, which then read and translate metrics from a car’s internal network. This data can be handled by Android applications using the OpenXC software component library.  It can be used with the OSGi framework and the Eclipse-based Dragonfly IDE. The software is now in a limited test release. It is an important indicator of how far open-source efforts may spread.

Enthusiasm for modifying cars goes back a long ways.  “Cars have always had a maker/tinkerer culture,” said Giuli. Now, efforts such as Ford’s,  Local Motor’s and the Silicon Valley Automotive Open Source Group’s undertakings are looking to bring the open source software ethos into modern cars, which now sport more and more programmable electronics.

Even SOA has made an appearance in some embedded services development efforts that are based on modular methods for updating and enhancing automotive “infotainment” systems. Still, reminds Giuli, software development is very different in the automotive world.

T.J. Giuli, Ford Motor Co.

Consumer electronics design cycles are measured in months, versus years for cars, which must adhere to the strictest safety guidelines, he said. Remember, cars have extended warranties. “A lot of engineering goes into making it last for ten years or 150,000 miles. It’s almost like mil-spec,” he said.

That leads to difficulties, Giuli conceded. “At the end of this [almost] three-year development cycle, the technology is obsolete upon release.” Think of the advances in small devices that have occurred in the last three years.

There is significant potential in open platforms for automotive software development, according to expert viewers. “I think it’s really exciting to see the evolution of cars as a platform for development,” said Melinda Ballou, analyst and program director for Application Life-Cycle Management research at  IDC.

“Data and information that was locked up becomes available in a very different way to typical developers,” she said. Ballou also suggested use of Eclipse open source IDE software for Google’s Android Development Tools gives added vitality to the Eclipse platform.

While safety will remain a major concern, software such as that described by T.J. Giuli at EclipseCon will help build “Web 3.0” or “The Internet of Things” according to conference attendee Christof Hammel, developer, architect and programming engineer at auto parts giant Robert Bosch GmBH.

That will help meet consumer needs. “For the car today,  the new generation wants to have the features they have at home and with their  phones,” Hammel said.

Safety will remain a big factor. It is said that designing interfaces for mobile apps is different than for land-based apps - that is even truer for automotive computer system interface design. “Things that require total focus don’t make sense at all,” said Ford’s Giuli. “So you have to think about designing differently.”

His comments came only a day after representatives of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers urged congress to help ensure that mobile devices limit the likelihood of distracting drivers when the devices are included as part of vehicle systems. - Jack Vaughan

“Virtual images are tripling every two years, outpacing the doubling in compute power and essentially flat IT budgets,” IBM Tivoli Software General Manager Sabbah said in a statement coinciding with IBM’s Pulse Conference.

“With current operating practices, every two years you’d need 1.5 times the physical infrastructure to support cloud and twice the labor. That’s an unsustainable cost and management problem which is the exact opposite of the promise of cloud,” he continued, as he outlined benefits of IBM’s new SmartCloud Foundation offerings. While public cloud providers can be expected to ramp up to manage ultra-large configurations, it is more difficult to see how labor issues will affect the much discussed user-side cloud type known as private cloud.

Will work for cycles

The labor issue is a stubborn one, and it must be factored into cloud computing ‘what if?’ analyses that enterprise architects are now undertaking. Cost savings are crucial to the dream of cloud, but greater experience with this architecture leads many to downplay cost savings.

Various companies have been working to address the labor issues of cloud, which is a massively scaled architecture that calls for sophisticated and on-demand provisioning of increasingly complex configurations and many virtual images.

The effort suggests that this goes back a long ways. It certainly has been of concern as distributed computing and rack-based blade servers have multiplied. The movement toward grid and autonomic computing looked to address the challenge, and now cloud and even dev ops can be seen contending to solve the problem, but remedies have yet to take hold.

The poster children for the first rush of cloud - Google and Amazon - can be said to have “thrown people at the problem” as they both employed high head counts of developers to service vast farms of servers. And the developers are very advanced developers at that. The classic Google ranch hand is a math and algorithmic wizard who is also adept at systems programming. In Google’s early days, at least, this person combined development and operations skills to a startling degree.

Is cloud computing hugely labor intensive?

We wondered if other companies can repeat this model. So, when we caught up with Skytap’s Brian White at this week’s EclipseCon 2012 in Reston, Virg., we asked for his take. As vice president of products at cloud provider Skytap, White is responsible for product strategy and product management. Before this, he was director of developer resources for Amazon Web and launched the AWS Elastic Beanstalk platform-as-a-service offering. We asked if private cloud labor was not labor intensive.

“It’s hugely labor intensive,” White answered. This is for a reason. “There are things that make [public cloud] a challenge. One is keeping it up and running all the time.” Another, he said, is the fact that the number of servers you can deploy may be relatively modest. “You don’t have unlimited capacity for scaling,” he said.
Where cloud approaches have the most value, White and others have concluded, is where resource needs are unpredictable or irregular. That is why Skytap and many other cloud providers focus on the development and test markets.

Development and test tasks make for a dynamic workload, he said, adding “from a cost perspective you don’t need to have these projects running 24/7.”

For cloud, “there is a huge amount of hype around cost,” said White. “The real benefit people are getting out of it is agility - much more than just pure cost reduction.”

Continuous deployment

While it is largely a beneficial trend, the move to Agile development becomes a factor that further exacerbates the cloud planning dilemma of architects. This was borne home in conversation with Dave West, analyst, Forrester Research, who spoke on Lean development at EclipseCon 2012. He showed that deployment was no longer an end-of-the-Waterfall development lifecycle event. It is now a constant companion. That is because part of the Agile of goal is to deliver bits of functionality as they become available.

The new styles of deployment requirements are certainly an issue with which cloud computing administrators - as well as developers and architects - are going to have to deal. Here, cloud may drive change. It is shedding light on dark problems.

“Cloud is an interesting phenomenon,” said Forrester’s West. “I am excited about what I is doing to drive internal IT to think about its systems in a different way.” - Ryan Punzalan and Jack Vaughan
In the face of fairly rampant fear of placing data on a public cloud, much attention has been placed on private cloud – but labor and cost issues may unsettle such undertakings. What do you think?