Apache Tuscany

Sun and SOA: Too much Java and not enough open source?

Dan Blankenhorn at ZDNet has posted some provocative thoughts about the Java CAPS 6.0 SOA suite announcement from Sun Microsystems. His basic take is that Sun fails to live up to its self-generated open source billing. He writes:

A true open source SOA strategy would embrace support for competing alternatives, rather than try to push everyone into paying for (and building) on a Sun-only platform.

True enough, Java CAPS, based largely around the former SeeBeyond ESB, is pretty much all Java platform all the time. I’ve spoken with no small number of people in the SOA space who routinely point out that the Java platform at best is only part of an SOA strategy. Those laments are nothing new. Sun’s approach here is interesting because it’s the opposite of what JBoss is doing. For instance, Sun’s bragging that you get the NetBeans IDE and GlassFish app server with Java CAPS. Yet what if that’s more than you want or need? Maybe you’re not looking for a platform. While JBoss certainly can’t be accused of collecting open source purity points by pushing significant amounts of non-JBoss technology, it is pitching a modular SOA platform.

It gets to the question of how much technology and complexity do you need to pursue service orientation? This is where I repeat the old saw that SOA isn’t something you buy (or download), it’s something you do. Has Sun stuffed too much into Java CAPS or maybe users would be better served to skip the middleware and just use GlassFish? As Blankenhorn points out, in an open source world the app server and service bus ought to focus well beyond each other.

Also, the big SOA-related buzz at JavaOne was around the session on Apache Tuscany. Tuscany is an open source project put together well outside the auspices of the JCP and users at the biggest Java show of the year flocked to it. Apparently there’s healthy demand for open source functionality beyond the Sun platform.

That brings us to the newsiest part of the Java CAPS announcement: Sun is adding MDM tools via a project called Mural. XAware, Talend and Apatar (and others) are already out there offering up open source data integration. Is Mural necessary or does it aim to reinvent the wheel? Eclipse has its Data Tools Project as well. Data integration would seem to be an area where Sun could follow Blankenhorn’s advice and bring some outside technology into the fold.

Sun seems to be stuck in an odd place at the moment where it espouses and embraces many of the laudable benefits of open source software, but it has not yet embraced the concept enough to satisfy the purists or to perhaps even leverage open source to achieve notable innovation.

Bill Gates shakes up SOA - Oslo embraces UML

It hasn’t received much attention in SOA circles yet, but last week Bill Gates broke what might be the biggest news Microsoft has made in the SOA space since the debut of .NET.

At the TechEd conference in Orlando, Fla. he announced Oslo, Microsoft’s SOA modeling project, will incorporate UML. It was also revealed that Visual Studio 10 will feature UML support. At first blush that may not sound like a big deal. After all, it’s just Microsoft embracing a popular standard modeling language.

Yet Oslo is Microsoft’s Hail Mary pass over the rest of the SOA market and apparently the company has decided to end its religious differences with UML for the sake of giving Oslo mass appeal. Previously Microsoft had been pushing domain specific languages (DSLs) as an alternative to the general purpose format of UML. Unfortunately for the folks in Redmond, DSLs have failed to gain much traction. Part of the problem is getting the people who form a domain to agree upon a standard syntax. Another part is having that DSL interact with anything outside of its domain. Those things surely will come with the march of time, but the uptake has been painfully slow.

SOA demands some commonality, that everyone stop trying to be so special and idiosyncratic. Microsoft has always understood that on some levels, but it’s got skin in the proprietary software business (actually it’s got skin, blood, muscle, bone, you name it). Its maverick tendencies have often led to it offering users products that do SOA the Microsoft way. That is in stark contrasts to the company’s Web services tooling, which has for the most part embraced open standards and heterogeneous systems (most notably Windows Communication Foundation). This is where I remind some readers out there that, yes, there truly is a difference between SOA and Web services.

In fact, one way to look at Oslo, which supposedly will offer a Community Technical Preview in September, is that this is Microsoft’s flag in the ground for SOA. It emphasizes the importance of modeling, attempting to bring the technology as close as possible to the business. As such, UML represents an excellent choice. It should create interoperability between Oslo projects and those built with rival modeling tools (e.g. IBM Rational). And Eclipse’s Modeling Development Tools Project will have a UML2 component ready by the end of the month.

UML gives Oslo a reach it never would have had if it were based on a proprietary modeling language. The UML foundation means Oslo stands a chance of being truly universal, which is as SOA a concept as you can get. It also puts pressure on the vendors backing Service Component Architecture. Has Microsoft managed to leapfrog them in terms of offering a general purpose SOA modeling platform? Or perhaps could this lead to Microsoft embracing SCA at some level, perhaps via Apache Tuscany?

With this UML announcement, Oslo suddenly ranks as a potentially powerful new addition to the SOA space. Nice to see that Bill Gates can still shake things up, even as he prepares to step down as full-time chairman of Microsoft.

JavaOne report: Apache Tuscany, can SOA be this easy?

In front of a packed room of a few hundred developers at the 2008 JavaOne conference yesterday, IBM’s Jean-Sebastien Delfino gave a presentation of the Apache Tuscany project, an open source implementation of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) standard. SCA is designed to facilitate a standard method of constructing, assembling and developing composite services and the Tuscany implementation (currently in version 1.2) looks to be ridiculously easy to use.

One of the mantras in the SOA space is that it’s hard to do. Sure enough, enterprise architecture and end-to-end governance come with a high degree of difficulty, but Tuscany seemingly has made it a snap to stitch together a composite, Web-based service. According to Delfino, the idea is to abstract away the plumbing details using HTML-style annotations and map out the business logic of the service.

Version 1.2 of Tuscany (which also leverages the Service Data Objects specification) has added distributed SCA domain management, an Eclipse plug-in, Atom binding through Apache Abdera project, improved JMS binding and an OSGi runtime. Delfino used Tuscany for a demo of a fruit store which starts with an online catalog and shopping cart. For those functions he used carrot tags to name the components and declare their implementations, properties and bindings. The transport protocols could be switched just by changing a tag, Delfino chose Atompub and JSON-RPC. He noted that he was running the service a Java SE environment, saying “It doesn’t have to run in a big app server. … Basically you have an Ajax app designed as a set of SCA components.” He added the whole process takes about 15 minutes.

Then he showed how to add a new component class (vegetables in this case) and a database, the latter of which involved another Atompub feed. After that he added a third-party supplier to the service by inserting a single SOAP binding line. “You can point to a WSDL if you want or specify policies,” he said.

Finally he showed off some widget functionality Tuscany has added to the SCA process, allowing the service to communicate with HTML.

Of the widget he said, “This is still an SCA component. It still talks to the catalog. You don’t need to change the model to speak to the client side.”

It should be interesting to see what the adoption rate for Tuscany is during the rest of the calendar year, particularly in terms of who uses it, because it comes across as being a fairly simple service creation tool. Basically, if you can handle some basic HTML coding, it would seem you’ve got the savvy to use Tuscany.