Development

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 »

Red Hat builds on Drools

Red Hat continues its move up the middleware stack, improving its basic rules engine, and launching rules authoring tools to open the doors of rules development to business analysts. JBoss Rules builds on open-source Drools.

The new release is said to include new tooling that makes it easier for business side folks to program rules.

How far can easy rules making go, when do the business people have to go to the Java heads to really make things happen? What do you think?

Facebook APIs add Activity Streaming

RSS and Atom are among the most useful elements to emerge from the XML and Web services revolution that occurred over the last 10 years. Who’d have thunk it? RSS seemed a small part of an XML initially, but has since become incredibly ubiquitous. Now, the world of syndication may be poised for another leap forward. Continued »

Legacy lost in Web 2.0 hype, survey finds

Core business applications are important to companies. But IT hiring priorities are skewed toward Web 2.0 developers, potentially leaving modernization of mission-critical applications in jeopardy, a survey released this week reveals. This is a “ticking time bomb” for IT, the survey sponsor argues. Continued »

Let’s look behind those SOA implementation numbers!

There was a sky-is-falling frenzy in the blogosphere of late in reaction to a Gartner press release headlined: “Number of Organizations Planning to Adopt SOA for the First Time Is Falling Dramatically,” writes Rich Seeley on SearchSOA.com. But, perhaps, the glass is half full.

Seeley takes a closer look at the data and reports that the survey itself presents a more positive picture of global SOA implementations. The survey found that in 2008, the number of organizations planning to adopt SOA in the next 12 months fell to 25 percent from 53 percent in 2007, but it also found that 53 percent already have SOA up and running.

Get it? Fewer people are starting SOA initiatives because there are more people who have started SOA initiatives. Yes, with a major economic downturn, some of the SOA late-comers have another reason to put off SOA, but, is that news?

Now, we like a good story as much as anybody. Yet we suspect the Gartner data has been blown up in order to fit well with today’s headlines. The devil is in the details, SOA or otherwise.

What lies ahead is more work - work to tame software for the purposes of commerce. SOA arose during the last downturn, largely as a response to too many software integration projects gone haywire.

“The reality is people are doing projects to have re-useable services,” Software AG’s Miko Matsumura told Seeley. Many SOA projects are proceeding according to plan.

“Whether those projects are called SOA or they are called “pickle juice” they will still move forward,” said Matsumura.

Pursuing the purpose behind SOA is the key. Some will succeed; some will fail and try again; some won’t try. We hope SearchSOA.com’s coverage is valuable to the people in the first two categories.

There was a sky-is-falling frenzy in the blogosphere of late in reaction to a Gartner press release headlined: “Number of Organizations Planning to Adopt SOA for the First Time Is Falling Dramatically,” writes Rich Seeley on SearchSOA.com. But, perhaps, the glass is half full.

Seeley takes a closer look at the data and reports that the survey itself presents a more positive picture of global SOA implementations. The survey found that in 2008, the number of organizations planning to adopt SOA in the next 12 months fell to 25 percent from 53 percent in 2007, but it also found that 53 percent already have SOA up and running.

Get it? Fewer people are starting SOA initiatives because there are more people who have started SOA initiatives. Yes, with a major economic downturn, some of the SOA late-comers have another reason to put off SOA, but, is that news?

Now, we like a good story as much as anybody. Yet we suspect the Gartner data has been blown up in order to fit well with today’s headlines. The devil is in the details, SOA or otherwise.

What lies ahead is more work - work to tame software for the purposes of commerce. SOA arose during the last downturn, largely as a response to too many software integration projects gone haywire.

“The reality is people are doing projects to have re-useable services,” Software AG’s Miko Matsumura told Seeley. Many SOA projects are proceeding according to plan.

“Whether those projects are called SOA or they are called “pickle juice” they will still move forward,” said Matsumura.

Pursuing the purpose behind SOA is the key. Some will succeed; some will fail and try again; some won’t try. We hope SearchSOA.com’s coverage is valuable to the people in the first two categories.

-By Jack Vaughan

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 »

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.

CEP opportunity in Wall Street bust?

Within every disaster there is the obvious downside, but also an unexpected opportunity. For example, in 1906, my grandfather was an unemployed carpenter in Los Angeles. Then the San Francisco fire and earthquake happened. Seeing an opportunity, he moved up north where his skills were suddenly in great demand.

Fast forward to today and the crisis on Wall Street and the plans in Washington to both rescue and better regulate the financial industry. Complex event processing (CEP) has had a lot of initial success in programs for automated stock trading where price and other events trigger buys and sells. But that was in the boom time and now we are in the bust. Wall Street is doing trades at very low volumes.

So does CEP still have a future on Wall Street?

John Bates, whose research at Cambridge University in the U.K. helped pioneer the event-driven technology, told SOA Talk this week that he sees opportunities for CEP in the new era of financial regulation.

CEP is already being used in banking to detect fraud by scanning transactions for events that indicate nefarious activities, noted Bates, who is now vice president of Apama Products, which develops CEP technology for Progress Software.

CEP can also be used for real-time market surveillance to monitor events that might indicate market manipulation and other forbidden practices, he said.

So if CEP is not already on the radar at the U.S. Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Security and Exchange Commission, it may be soon.

IBM vs. standards bodies?

Can major vendors buy standards bodies’ approval for specifications that support their products?

Continued »