Rails rally cry heard in .NET framework arena

Rails as a lightweight framework is getting a look-see from many in the developer community. The Ruby-based architecture walks developers though the common practice of Web application building. “It gives you an object-relational map and does the mapping for you,” said the co-author of the new book, “Rails for .NET Developers.” These authors see value for Rails, even for .NET development teams. Lighter is better, they suggest. Of course Microsoft is tracing these developments too, and has a Ruby software effort, known as IronRuby, underway. The trends are discussed in Rich Seeley’s piece, “.NET Web developers ride Ruby and Rails.”

Is this the dawning of the age of hosted providers?

Recently spoke with John Rymer, analyst with Forrester. The topic was going to be cloud computing, but Rymer advised that this term, for now at least, has hardly any meaning. That is because anything that is remotely new is being called a ‘cloud solution.’ For now, says Rymer, a more useful and illuminating term is ‘hosted provider.’ Continued »

Test SOA for the unexpected

Testing service-oriented architecture requires thinking outside the box to the point that your test cases hit an application with totally unexpected input, argues Thomas Fredell, CTO of IntraLinks. Continued »

SOA meets Cloud Computing at Microsoft PDC

For Microsoft there seemed to be a somewhat humbler tone at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this past week. Even the biggest new SOA modeling and Cloud Computing initiatives were described as “nascent” works in progress and subject to change.
Continued »

Forrester sees two compute clouds

Compute Cloud offerings can be broken down into two types, says Frank Gillett, vice president and principal analyst, Forrester Research. Continued »

Red Hat’s JBoss open source ’superplatform’ – Burton

Red Hat’s is transforming JBoss middleware into a “superplatform” providing an open source alternative to commercial offering from IBM WebSphere, Oracle, and SAP, writes Chris Hadad, analyst with Burton Group. Continued »

IBM re-architects SOA market strategy

IBM is ahead of the curve in providing vertical and horizontal service-oriented architecture products, but may be too far ahead of most of its customers, who are still in the early stages of SOA implementation, writes Dwight B. Davis at Ovum. Continued »

Gartner cautions on Oracle middleware status

Oracle Fusion middleware is currently based on a group of product suites for SOA and BPM that are “assemblies of convenience,” argue Gartner analysts.

The suites are made up of Oracle’s existing product line and the technologies from its acquisition of BEA earlier this year, according to a brief report on the state of the current Oracle middleware offering, Oracle OpenWorld’s Middleware Message Is ‘Watch This Space,’ published earlier this month.

The Gartner analysts note that little was said about middleware in the announcements at Oracle Open World last month other than the announced plan to put Fusion in the Amazon cloud. The roadmap announced this past July for the full integration of the BEA products into Oracle’s middleware will not come until sometime in 2009, Gartner predicts.

Rather than judging the future of Oracle middleware by this interim marketing strategy, Gartner analysts recommend waiting for Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 11g, due in the next six to 12 months.

That release ”will begin to implement the announced road map, and platform modernizations, such as support of OSGi Alliance technology and Service Component Architecture, expanded hot-pluggability, and the extensive use of Oracle Coherence XTP-distributed cache,” the report states.

HP builds ‘culture of governance’ for SOA

HP solidifies leadership in SOA governance with Systinet 3.0, which now covers services lifecycle, business process, and IT service management, writes analyst Dana Gardner in his blog this week.

“The newest market leading Systinet UDDI registry forms the cockpit for managing not only services, but with the newly added Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) support, takes the helm for business processes, too,” Gardner writes. “HP plans to further push the envelope on a master management value even further into IT operations and IT Service Management, as well as a PPM role with the registry.”

The addition of a configuration management database (CMDB) sets the stage for a wider “culture of governance” to emerge in enterprises, Kelly Emo, SOA product marketing manager at HP Software, tells Gardner. 

Gardner also points to a comprehensive assessment of HP’s governance products and strategies by fellow analyst Brad Shimmin posted on the Current Analysis Website.

In SOA provides a test for QA, HP finds, SearchSOA covered HPs expansion of governance to cover quality assurance. And in an earlier article, HP integrates design and runtime SOA governance, SearchSOA covered the design time / runtime integration in Systinet.

Microsoft’s muddled modeling: Getting the ducks in line

Microsoft basically has a sturdy place in the enterprise, but its role just now is very fluid. Of course, its Windows servers have been in the enterprise a long time, and its tools are very prevalent. But its success with desktop-based developer tools is only slowly converting to success with server-based developer tools, and this is due in some part to a a muddled modeling strategy. Continued »