In reviewing this year’s submissions, some vivid trends emerged, said Thomas Erl, prominent SOA author, educator and conference chair. “Many sessions are about the convergence of different areas,” said Erl, noting the original event covered SOA, then it covered SOA and cloud computing, and now it has broadened further.

“As you go through all the submissions, you kind of witness an evolution in the industry. It is a reflection as to where the industry itself is going,” he said. As the naming of the event suggests, Erl sees an emerging field that can be called “service technology.”

“In the early days of SOA, people associated SOA with Web services. There was a communications barrier [with people] who thought it was just a way of implementing Web services,” he said. “Now we are seeing many more sessions that look at how [cloud, SOA and services] are applied together, and what the implications are.”

The Symposium, set for Sept 24 -  25 at Imperial College, is slated to cover a broad variety of SOA and cloud-related topics as well. Among scheduled sessions are “Lightweight BPM and SOA,” “Moving Applications to the Cloud: Migration Options,” and “The Rise of the Enterprise Service Bus.” Also on the agenda is a series of on-site training and certification workshops. Billed as “bootcamp-style training sessions,” the workshops will provide preparation for a number of industry-recognized certifications, including SOA architect and cloud technology professional programs.

A key aim of the conference is to offer SOA, cloud computing and service technologies practitioners a look at real-world implementations and field-tested industry practices. However, the event will also cover emerging trends and innovations in the space.

Keynotes at the event include SOA case studies and panels featuring technologists from both NASA and the European Space Agency. Gartner’s Ann Manes and TOG’s Chris Harding are speaking. FAA and DoD presenters are on hand as well. Conference tracks will range from cloud-based enterprise architecture and new REST and Web services techniques, to service infrastructure and virtualization.

The REST-related sessions delve into one of the brightest stars in today’s SOA firmament.  In fact, Erl  recently debuted a new book in his Prentice Hall Service Technology Series, entitled “SOA with Rest: Principles, Patterns and Constraints for Building Enterprise Solutions with REST,” that is solely dedicated to discussing SOA and REST.

As new phenomena enter the IT world, they usually have antecedents, noted Erl. One such phenomenon is the open API, which has sprung catlike on the modern technology consciousness. The topic is covered in symposium sessions such as “The Open API Economy: What Is It and How Do I Capitalize on It?” led by IBM’s Laura Olson.

“A whole new segment of the IT community has rediscovered the term ‘API,’” Erl mused. “Now we have new ways of doing APIs. It is interesting how much we can further build upon concepts that have been around for decades and re-leverage them.”

The largest international conference of its kind, the symposium will feature over 100 expert speaker sessions, spread across thirteen conference tracks. The overarching theme of this year’s event is “Exploring Modern Service Technologies and Practices.” Much of the event will focus on how to realize modern service technologies in the real world. – Stephanie Mann and Jack Vaughan

Few application development managers are not affected by the mobile tsunami. They are now sorting through the costs and benefits of a new category known as mobile middleware, which has arisen to deal with mobile device diversity. As it turns out, mobile apps are a bigger problem for application development managers than was mobile email. They have to support every conceivable type of endpoint, and select between HTML5, native and hybrid programming schemes.  

The PC was a game changer. The same appears to be true of the smartphone, which recently crossed an inflection point, surpassing the desktop PC in unit sales. Equal as influences are social media, open APIs and app stores.

Social media applications that aggregate news and information have caused a big boost in use of integration middleware using “REST” and RSS-style services. SOA laid the foundation, but it is the simple REST version of SOA that is carrying integration development forward today, as seen in social media and mobile application development. Basically, REST underlies the big digital consumer success stories called Amazon, Google, Facebook and eBay, and their style of development is now penetrating the established enterprises, and software architects must understand how to build these modern style systems.

Now we are seeing a type of consumerization of IT integration that resembles the open APIs of the big e-commerce and social media sites. The idea is that you publish out APIs that let outsiders hook into your Web versions of your enterprise applications. Some SOA houses are building API management tool sets in response. They want their APIs for B2B to fly off the virtual shelves as the MP3s do at the iTunes store with which consumers are familiar.

Consumerization of SOA integration could be taken more broadly still. Seldom when you are calling, are operators actually standing by. The Web has enabled – some might say ‘condemned’ – the consumer to take over the role of key operator of yore. This requires teams to design and deliver much better applications and application interfaces than ever before. This is becoming more and more true as mobile devices flourish.

Again, aspects of the “new” consumerization of IT can sound like an old story. The notion that end users can, with the right tools, manage to meet the bulk of their programming own needs was heard in the days of the original Visual Basic, Lotus Notes and PowerBuilder. To a point it was true. We hear that now about open APIs. Is it more likely to be more true this time? What do you think? -Jack Vaughan

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.”

In the past Ramji led open-source strategy across Microsoft, and was a founding member of BEA’s AquaLogic product team. He now acts as strategist for Apigee, where, along with others, he writes for the Apigee API Best Practices blog. He likens the token-based OAuth protocol to a valet key that allows users to go from Web site to Web site (from Twitter to TweetDeck, from Facebook to Twitter, from the New York Times to Facebook, and so on) without multiple logins.

”OAuth allows an application to act as an intermediary to services like Twitter – etcetera – on behalf of the end user,” he said. This type of token service for site hopping is a key mark of the Web 2.0 and the so-called ”App Economy” today. “We couldn’t have done this years ago,” said Ramji.

OAuth is said to play nicely with widely used Web-based REST methods. Moreover, Ramji suggested that OAuth makes a ”good enough” security service available to a broader group of developers. The mobile device explosion seems likely to expand OAuth use.

Previous alternatives involve a more complex set of processes for developers to learn. Of course, OAuth has its limits. OAuth aims directly at site-to-site application-to-application hopping over HTTP.  It would be used in some enterprises along with SAML, OpenID and other more complex security services located as gateways nearer to vital backend systems.

OAuth can be seen as an indicator of a sea change in services, said Ramji. ”It is as a token-based security system that allows users’ account information to be used by a third-party application in a way that does not expose the user name and password to that application.”

What can go wrong? ”The process of wiring up OAuth is pretty complicated for the average developer,” said Ramji. ”Also, it is still a spec in motion. No two apps really quite line up easily.”

That is the opening for Apigee. The company has built a single, simple API to talk to multiple end-services, he said. The hosted offering acts as a service broker that handles requests on your behalf. Developers can use Ruby, Objective C, Java and JavaScript to call the Apigee OAuth API that supported -when announced in August - Salesforce REST, Chatter, LinkedIn and Twitter APIs – with more to come.

Apigee’s work is emblematic of the work of API-intensive companies that may change the economics of the software industry. –Jack Vaughan

This site posted a while ago on issues of XML, and the growing popularity of JSON; in short, it said there is a crowd that finds that XML is overly complicated and that JSON is a simpler solution. That may form the crux of some developments in the year just new.

Of course, JSON is simple because it was meant to be – one of creator Doug Crockford’s aims was to create a spec that fit on a mere business card. But when people find they really really need things they will look for ways to extend anything, including JSON. Not welcome, because the the “eXtensible” in XML was an entry for complexity, in some people’s estimation. Sure enough, a JSON Schema developed to provide data rigor has come to be seen as too complex by more than a few.

McKendrick writes about an alternative – Orderly, a lighter JSON Schema if you will. He cites blogger Ganesh Prasad, who says JSON Schema long-windedness has been rectified with the launch of the Orderly new schema language, which, in turn, was developed by Lloyd Hilaiel of Yahoo!

Finally before the new year gets older, to Joe McKendrick, who was nice enough to point to our bit about JSON and XML, Happy New Year!

Virtualization, services and ever cheaper hardware paved the way from grid to cloud. It may be too early to say, but cloud does seem to be a bit of a better play for a wider variety of jobs. Part of the reason grid didn’t get too far off the mark was that its poster stories were usually scientific applications…something of a niche.

Still, it is interesting to conjecture on how science  -  both big and small science – will be done on the cloud. Relational data bases are a tried and true way of dealing with data, scientific and other. The cloud at this point is highly influenced by Google’s flatter MapReduce/Hadoop ways of handling data. Still, Amazon just augmented its SimpleDB with a straightahead RDB (MySQL).

Some view on the nature of that possible transformation of science data and cloud this we comes via Michael Schatz.  For the biology community, moving to MapReduce/Hadoop-style architecture would be a challenging undertaking. SOAP and XML made some serious inroads there. Schatz is working on adapting important bioinformatics tools to the cloud paradigm. He has discussed the issues on SourceForge where he documents some project work. Check out Haddop for Computational Biology.

The ‘Web’ part of Web services was different, somewhat exploitative. The Web was a popular success, and you have to imagine someone thinking that if they named the latest software architecture after the Web, good things might happen. It wasn’t a big reach; Web services did tend to use the Web’s bread-and-butter protocol, HTTP.

That brings us to REST, which some people feel is truer to the spirit of the web than classic Web services employing XML and SOAP albeit over http.

The value of REST architecture is that it takes better advantage of Web architecture, indicated Bill Burke, RedHat Fellow, former Chief Architect for JBoss, certainly one of the most startling successful open-source Java implementations of all time. Burke is now Contributor to JBoss and a Project Lead on the JBoss RESTEasy Project.

“The crux of it is rediscovering http – trying to understand how the web becomes so prevalent,” he said. “SOAP only uses a bit of the http protocol. It really uses http only as a transport mechanism, like a socket.” We talked to Burke on the eve of TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas. At the event, Burke will lead a session entitled ”Putting Java to REST: The New Java + RESTful Web Services Specification.” [This event is presented by TheServerSide.com, SearchSOA’s sister publication.]

Burke maintains that the whole slate of standards known as “WS-*” [“WS-‘Star’”] have become too much of a moving target. “Getting vendors to cooperate is hard – ask Apache,” he chides.

Still, http has forged on. Now every platform supports http, so you don’t need infrastructure at both ends of the pipe.

REST forgoes certain levels of interoperability, but that may have its advantages.

Burke says: “What is cool about REST is you are focused on straight http. So instead of worrying about interoperability between vendors…you worry about interoperability between applications. You let http do the heavy lifting.”

Being the SOA guy I have to ask questions like ”Is REST anti-SOA?” Not at all, says Burke, although he is ready to say REST is anti-WS-Star … and SOAP.

British microformat maven,  Silverlight fan and .NET developer Chris Hayuk recently put forward the idea of applying microformatting to REST API issues.

He writes:

The big issue as far as I can see it is that decent client proxy generators don’t seem to exist. You either have to download a client library built by the developer / an open source project / build one yourself.

Hayuk breifly reviews client proxy generation via the WCF REST Starter Kit, DSL’s (OSLO), and C# 4.0. He then opines on microformats, REST and APIs. One wonders if Sun’s WADL will meet folks needs in this space ..

Related API info
Silverlight REST API microformat – .NET, Silverlight, Windows Azure, and other ramblings (from the UK) blog
soapUI testing for WADL and REST – SearchSOA.com

At PDC 2008, Windows 7 was unveiled as the new workman-like operating system. No more high-concept marketing titles for this version, just the humble if lucky number 7. It’s slogan: “A solid foundation for new possibilities.” In the political parlance de jour it might be known as Windows the Operating System.

The biggest news at this year’s Microsoft show was the announcement of a product that does have a Vista-style name, Windows Azure, the new Cloud Computing platform programmable in the RESTful-style. In a PowerPoint-free keynote on Tuesday, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Don Box demonstrated coding for the Cloud platform using one API and unlimited URIs that had the developer audience cheering the simple elegance.

Whenever, one of Box’s demos failed, he harkened back to Ray Ozzie’s caveat about all the new technology being nascent.

Architects and others interested in building applications using the service-oriented approach got a better idea of what the Oslo modeling tools were all about. Box was also busy demonstrating the new “M” modeling language that is part of this offering.

Oslo is refined and better defined now, according to David Chappell, principal of Chappell & Associates, who has written a paper, Workflows, Services, and Models, published by Microsoft covering the new technologies.

“Initially, Oslo referred to a lot of different things,” Chappell told SearchSOA. “Now, Oslo refers to modeling technologies and the repository. So just in terms of clarity, that’s progress.”

In its current iteration Oslo includes “a repository, providing a common place to store a range of information about your IT environment,” the M language for describing that information, and a modeling tool, codenamed Visual Studio “Quadrant,” for working with repository information, Chappell explained.

But no Microsoft show would be complete without some controversy, so we have the interesting positioning of Windows Azure as a “fifth generation of computing” and perhaps the replacement killer app for SOA. This Cloud versus SOA debate is comparing apples and oranges, according to analysts SearchSOA talked to for an article on the nascent controversy, Is Microsoft dissing SOA just to push Azure Cloud computing?

Just asking.

Granted, I only polled half a dozen people (though I’ll note here that they are half a dozen really smart people). The response I got from all of them is that WOA strikes them as redundant and nothing particularly new, an empty suit if you will. One wrote, “It reminds me a lot of the attempt by someone to gain some name recognition with the ‘SOA 2.0′ concept (which one vendor did try to use and then dropped after it was rejected by the SOA community).” Another responded, “It’s the same old thing, relabeled with an even MORE unwieldy name.”

Yet another noted, “This is just composite Web apps.”

Not a single one of them voiced a problem with the notion that Web-based development is an excellent place to concentrate your resources. In fact, some of the architects stated they are eagerly pursuing these sorts of development strategies.

That said, no one showed any love for the “WOA” acronym. “God forbid this take hold because it could complicate something the industry has been trying to simplify,” said one of the architects. He listed numerous reason why WOA, as a term, could do more harm than good:

• Users should have exactly one enterprise architecture, many don’t and they don’t need the confusion of “which architecture should I use?”
• WOA doesn’t really have an underlying architecture, it’s more a set of best practices around REST, RIA and composite apps.
• If users perceive WOA to be outside the principles of SOA, it could prove an excellent vehicle for building Web-based stovepipes.
• WOA toes and sometimes crosses the line of being technology driven. “We plan on using Google Apps, but Google Apps needs to fit into our structure, not the other way around.”

That last point about the potential technology driven nature of WOA was a point of contention for another architect. “One of the big problems we’ve had to fight is people who act as if SOA is tied to middleware or specific standards like SOAP or to a specific data format like XML. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Just because you’ve got some new technology to use doesn’t mean you go back to shoddy engineering. Everyone should know better than to let a specific hot technology drive the bus. It will cool off and you still need to be in business.”

Strikeiron CEO Dave Linthicum has also blogged about the upside of WOA. He pitched WOA as a potential gateway to SOA.

What is changing quickly is that enterprises are finding that the path of least resistance is in essence to build their SOAs on the Web, using Web resources, including content, internet delivered APIs, and Web services. Once there is success with WOA you’ll see the same patterns emerging behind the firewall, or SOA.

The polled architects viewed that as a perfectly legitimate approach, but one noted, “It’s still SOA. I just don’t see where WOA adds anything. Terms like this tend to make people in the field angry. In this case, it’s an attempt to sell them something they’ve already bought. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to use REST or build composite apps using Web tools.”

Time will tell whether WOA gains traction, but these architects expressed an unequivocal desire to have no more than one something-oriented architecture in their lives.