.NET

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 »

Application modernization: COBOL meets .NET

How will IT organizations maintain the COBOL applications written by the whiz kid programmers of the 1970s? Continued »

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.”

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.
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Oslo - What it is

Someday, maybe too not soon, Oslo will cease to be whatever someone wants it to be. In other words, Microsoft will disclose enough about the Oslo marchitecture for a consensus of people to decide what it is. Fortunately, Don Box is blogging a bit and we’ll get a bit more inkling. Continued »

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.

Look who’s using SOA

We at SearchSOA.com have a number of SOA user stories in the works at the moment and it strikes me that we could just about churn out a case study a day at this point in time. Last month at the IBM Impact conference, I blogged that seemingly every type of business imaginable has been embracing service orientation.

We’re encountering more big SOA projects than ever before and you’ve got to wonder what the working rationale is these days for an app dev project that isn’t loosely coupled and conformant with an enterprise architecture. What’s the counter argument? Obviously it can be less expensive in the short term and less complex to throw applications together in piecemeal fashion, but over time that approach becomes costly. It’s also a mess from an engineering standpoint.

Here are some of the most recent examples:

• Cars.com turned to SOA to help it with rapid growth
• Deutsche Post used service orientation to blend Java and .NET apps in a CRM system
• Con-way plans on building mobile apps for its transportation fleet based on the composite development its pursued over the past decade
• Business process orchestration has become a key for online real estate company Move Inc.
• SOA taught the Delaware Electric Cooperative the importance of BPM
• Insurance industry information provider MIB Inc. rebuilt its entire business around SOA

You can find links to 18 other SOA case studies in our top stories of 2007 compilation. The number of users who can document proven success with SOA is exploding. Does it deliver as advertised in every situation? No, nothing does and that’s why we go out and try to find the users with best practices to share. This is a complex field, but the ranks of users who’ve found the benefits that justify tackling the complexity are growing almost daily.

Here’s a question for those who don’t count SOA as a core competency in their app dev shop: why?

Open source leading SOA charge in 2008

Last August I noted that Microsoft regularly finds itself buried under an avalanche of news coming from its Java-based competition. It’s impossible to compete with that kind of volume and that fact alone has caused the SOA market to gravitate toward Java and away from .NET.

Well, something similar is happening this year with open source vs. proprietary vendor in 2008, but, in what should be considered a bit of a stunner, it’s the open source folks who are creating the news deluge. It started innocently enough when Mulesource and WSO2 both released REST-based SOA registries. Then Red Hat released a modularized SOA platform in February. Now WSO2 and Mulesource are back with another major round of announcements. Based on its December Spring Integration release, you can expect SpringSource to become an increasingly visible player in the SOA market. Sun Microsystems will surely have some service-oriented dogs and ponies to show off at next month’s JavaOne conference and Eclipse, which has already debuted the Swordfish SOA runtime this year, will have a whole slate of SOA-enabled tools in its June Ganymede release.

The open source players are pounding away at the news cycle, throwing a steady stream of innovation into the mix. Obviously traditional app dev titans still dominate the market in terms of dollars and customers, but it’s about time somebody noted that we’ve got a movement on our hands. If you’re looking to build loosely coupled services, there are a host of open source vendors to choose from and that ecosystem is growing at an aggressive rate.

Change, particularly in an established market, doesn’t come in one big seismic event. It takes years of consistent pressure to remake this kind of landscape, but to be sure, we are in a period of volcanic activity for the open source market.

Could Yahoo! change Microsoft’s app dev focus?

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ve probably heard by now that Microsoft has placed a $44.6 billion bid to buy Yahoo!.

We’ll leave it to others to ponder the Wall St. implications of the move, but in her All about Microsoft blog, Mary Jo Foley posits “a Yahoo! purchase would irrevocably change the kind of company Microsoft is.” Foley focuses on advertising in her comments, but it could represent a change in Microsoft’s application development focus. Microsoft built itself around operating systems and desktop applications, the things you do with a computer. Of course, with the advent of the Internet, what you do with a computer has changed radically. Yahoo! and Google have made hay in offering up Web-based applications, leveraging search capabilities and creating dynamic user portals.

Microsoft has tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to gain a dominant position in those arenas. While Dana Gardner speculates a Microsoft-Google partnership might be a mess, it could represent a return to Microsoft’s core applications business. Yahoo! and Silverlight (for RIA and composite apps) represent where the next wave of applications are headed. On the enterprise side, easily distributed Web apps and multimedia mashups are where a lot of companies want to go. It’s where the innovation is and for Microsoft, a company which has always fancied itself an innovator, that’s a good place to be. There are those who think enterprise mashups will be the killer app once users get a service-oriented architecture in place, the idea being that a loosely coupled infrastructure will lead to dynamic new applications.

It’s no secret Microsoft has long faced criticism in SOA circles because its remedy for users grappling with a heterogeneous application environment has been to pursue homogeneity on the .NET platform. Microsoft’s Oslo model-driven development initiative is still in the planning stages, but a Yahoo! purchase begs the question “Why bother with application infrastructure?” Obviously no one expects Microsoft to pull its irons completely out of that fire, but if that’s not going to be a big growth area for the good folks in Redmond (and IBM and Oracle/BEA are gobbling up large chunks of that pie) then maybe it makes more sense to concentrate on New Wave application development. Microsoft could make leveraging service orientation its app dev enterprise play rather than implementing service orientation.

Let someone else do the tedious work and be the company that does the cool stuff.

There’s so many facets to this offer that it’s impossible to assess the true implications of a Microsoft/Yahoo! merger, but going after Yahoo! does indicate where Redmond’s heart is. If Microsoft really wanted to pursue application infrastructure, BEA Systems was a completely complimentary acquisition target. It would have given Microsoft unparalled reach across the .NET and Java platforms. Yet it didn’t make that play. Instead it’s made a Web play which could build on top of of what the application infrastructure vendors provide, potentially expanding its enterprise app dev audience well beyond the .NET platform.