<<Because of these business changes, "You have to do things faster
and you have to enable change more quickly, and this is driving a new
development paradigm in composite applications," Gold-Bernstein
observed. "They enable new applications to be built from both new and
existing components, kind of like a Lego block paradigm of building
applications."

<These components are loosely coupled code components that represent
well-defined and self-contained business services. "This is
important. Loose coupling is a design criterion that enables agility.
It can't depend on the context or state of other services," she noted.

<The business services become part the overall service oriented
architecture (SOA). "Service-oriented architectures require well-
defined interfaces and this is the evolving role of Web services.
Finally, we have a standard interface that everyone's agreed on,
enabling service-oriented architectures to take off," Gold-Bernstein
added.>>

and

<<"I don't think we could come up with a better symbol of integration
than the Swiss Army knife, whether your concern is composite
application assembly or service-oriented architecture," observed Glen
Johnson, Director of Marketing of Magic Software -- whose case study
list fittingly included Swiss Army knife manufacturer Victorinox in
addition to Nextel Partners, Siemens and the San Francisco municipal
court system.

<Johnson described Magic's approach. It seeks to minimize the impact
of change without sacrificing the ability to drill down to real logic
while enabling abstraction, personalization, interface consolidation
and maximum security, flexibility and extensibility from legacy
systems via vertical templates that provide highly flexible business
rules.

<Through a series of visual editors, a system architect is able to
model the desired business processes with iBOLT Topology Editor,
which uses a very simple drag-and-drop and drill-down paradigm to
quickly model environments, he asserted.

<iBOLT's Flow Editor describes business processes and flows, while
eDeveloper provides rapid development via the BPEL4WS standard
supported by IBM, BEA, and Microsoft. iBOLT`s Business Process Editor
and activity monitoring complete what Johnson called "a simple
framework for application-to-application information sharing.">>

You can find a comparison of these viewpoints at:
http://www.ebizq.net/topics/soa/features/4040.html?pp=1

Gervas

There is an interesting event being hosted by the NYJavaSIG in New
York to do with SOA/WS.  Of course you will have to join the Group to
attend.

Below you can find the links to news on the event and the NYJavaSIG:






http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jini_javaspaces/message/533

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NYJavaSIG/

Gervas

I have just posted a ZT article to my EII Group which is also
relevant to this Group.  You can find it at the link below:










http://groups.yahoo.com/group/enterprise-information-
integration/message/35

Gervas

Some of you might well be interested in this free software offer.
You can find it at http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15197


Andrew

Interesting paper, but it is one of those tiresome PDFs which seems
to make cutting and pasting impossible.  Still, you can find it at
the link below (might force you to register):








http://www.wrq.com/assets/products_0901.pdf

You might also find this article relevant to your working life:

http://www.watergenius.com/articledetail.asp?articleid=1021

Gervas

Interesting article about IDE ISVs shifting gears to providing SOA
support:

http://www.computerwire.info/cwdirectionsvw/10280E6F06C0A00680256E3200
45A870

//Within a few weeks of announcing the Call for Papers one clear
trend emerged - that service-oriented architecture (SOA) was going to
be the next shoe to drop. Never has a single notion recurred so
evenly throughout every session and all three keynotes.

The opening keynote, from Orbitz's CTO Chris Hjelms, featured SOA, as
did the two other keynotes, one by Macromedia's General Manager David
Mendels and the other by IBM's Robert S. Sutor, director of marketing
for IBM's WebSphere Foundation Software as well as its Web services
and SOA efforts.

What follows are a selection of perspectives and reports on the show,
first-hand reports that give the flavor of what was another very rich
technical program, complemented by the usual full two-day Expo that
the "Edge" series is justifiably well-known for.//

This looks an interesting show.  It is good to see we belong to such
a topical usergroup!

This article you can see at

http://sys-con.com/story/?storyid=44361&DE=1

Saludos,

Enrique

<<OASIS announced today the formation of the Electronic Business
Service Oriented Architecture Technical Committee.

<The committee will use new ISO approved ebXML standards as a basis
for describing an SOA and implementation techniques.

<Duane Nickull of Adobe Systems is the proposed committee chair. He
said the committee's work will touch every enterprise.

<"A modern service-oriented architecture is core to enabling
enterprises to efficiently integrate and distribute business
processes across multiple systems with reliability and security,"
Nickull said in a statement. "The OASIS ebSOA Technical Committee
will explore how various ebXML and Web service components work
together as a cohesive system.">>

You can find this at

http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26
_gci958649,00.html?track=NL-110&ad=479584

Gervas

Those of you who are not members of the NGAA Group might care to take
a look at this discussion arising out of an article by Seán (link
below):








http://groups.yahoo.com/group/n-gaa/message/188

Gervas

And here is another discussion which might interest you, this time on
the EII Group (link below):








http://groups.yahoo.com/group/enterprise-information-
integration/message/39

Gervas

Hi,

I just started a website that showcase pictures of cities from around
the world. I would like to invite you guys to give it a try and check
it out. The website is http://www.urbanplanet.org. This is no spam,
just really would like you to check out my website on cities. You can
register and start posting your own travel pictures. Thank you.

Howard

Note from the moderator:

This is totally irrelevant to this Group and normally I would never approve this
message.  However I cannot be strict, boring and pedantic all the time so I will
make an exception for an intriguing website with some great pictures!

While I am making this exception I will point you to another interesting website
which is fascinating in its own curious way.  These URLs were sent to me by Mark
Madsen in Geneva:



"Worth reading the comments added at http://photo.net as well."

<Mark Madsen <mark.madsen@...> wrote:
Featured at the moment on photo.net:

<http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/ >>

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

<<IBM's rival in Java server software, BEA Systems, is expected to
provide further details next month on Project Sierra, a plan that
describes the business benefits of an SOA. Oracle earlier this week
introduced Java development tools to promote a services architecture.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's Indigo project, an integral part of the
upcoming "Longhorn" version of Windows, is meant to enable SOAs.

<Next week, IBM also plans to reveal further detail about its long-
term plan for providing the tools and services to put SOAs into
practice. The company is expected to introduce consulting services
from IBM Global Services intended to help companies make the
transition to the new systems design, sources said.

<IBM's consulting-driven approach to services-oriented architecture
reflects the company's belief that SOAs represent a significant shift
in computing systems designs, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at
research company ZapThink. Much like earlier shifts to client/server
and Web-based computing, SOAs require companies to rework how they
design, build and run their business applications.>>

You can find this article at

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5193153.html

Gervas

You could view ESA as being SOA on an enterprise scale.  ESA's main
proponent at present is SAP, but Andy Mulholland, CTO of CGEY, has a
few words to say about it as well:

<<This returns to the point made way back in 1998 by Chris Meyer in
his book Blur: "Welcome to the new economy—a world where the rate of
change is so fast it is only a blur, where the clear lines
distinguishing buyer from seller, product from service, employee from
entrepreneur are disappearing. To profit from these revolutionary
patterns of business you need a dynamic guide to the new economy."

<So in conclusion what does all this mean?  Maybe the degree of
change it implies is frightening, and the classic response to being
frightened is to either freeze (do nothing) or flee (go and find some
diversionary activity that looks promising but is not so
challenging).  Either would be a mistake; as in all things, timing is
all. Starting early and small, rather than starting late and needing
to immediately change on a large scale, is preferable for a host of
good reasons. Enterprise Services Architecture is the sound way of
achieving this: it is a well-constructed overall program, dealing
with things that are perhaps of no concern on today's smaller project
but will become of concern as this project expands and needs to
interact with other projects. It is a great way to get short-term
wins in a long-term game by building on past success with the
existing systems. Nobody in business, or IT, is going to complain
about that route. Justification methods for small projects piloting
new abilities can be more relaxed to allow experimentation with the
metrics by which business value is identified.>>

You can find this at:

www.cgey.com/alliances/sap/pdf/mulchap.pdf

Gervas

<<"Developers should be incented to maximize their reuse of
functionality," said James Kobielus, a senior analyst for the Burton
Group and the author of the report. "The key is to lessen the amount
of new code produced for a project and deliver what is needed in a
short amount of time.

"The extent to which others reuse my code, I should be incentivized
by that. Others validate my code by invoking it again."

<Kobielus' report recommends that enterprises adopt loose-coupling
principles -- namely separate service interfaces from the underlying
implementations -- as they plan, develop and manage applications on
their networks. A Web Services framework, meanwhile, should serve as
the standard environment for SOAs.

"SOA is not an abstraction. It's a fairly new term to describe an old
dream of maximum reuse of functionality throughout an application
infrastructure," Kobielus said. "It should speed up development,
increase reuse and maintain consistency of applications. For example,
if an order-entry system is implemented once in an organization and
it's a good [basic tool], other application development teams should
reuse that system across a business by invoking it through a standard
interface as defined in WSDL.">>

You can find this article at:

http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26
_gci954682,00.html?track=NL-130&ad=480728

Gervas

Prentice Hall has recently published "Autonomic Computing" by
Richard Murch of IBM.  Autonomic computing has significant
applications in next generation architectures, service oriented
architectures, and distributed computing in general.  More information
is available at:  http://www.phptr.com/title/013144025X

      In the interest of full disclosure, this book does include four
pages on IntaMission's Autevo product suite, clearly demonstrating
that Richard Murch is an intelligent and insightful author.

Regards,

Patrick

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Patrick May                            | IntaMission Ltd.
                                        | Thames Court, 1 Victoria Street
patrick.may@...            | Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 1YB, UK
http://www.intamission.com             |

I have just posted a link to an interesting article by Robert
Eisenberg on the EII Group.  See the link below:








http://groups.yahoo.com/group/enterprise-information-
integration/message/42

Gervas

IBM:

<<IBM on Wednesday rolled out a series of software and services
intended to help corporate users more efficiently create and deploy
SOAs (service-oriented architectures) on their existing
infrastructures.

<Specifically, the new products and services, the first of what
company officials claim will be a "blitz" of SOA-related products
over the next several months, are designed to help customers build a
collection of business processes. These business processes hinge on
reusable and standard interfaces that can integrate applications
inside a company as well as externally with customers and suppliers,
company officials explained.

<"All the services are based around the notion of ensuring that users
are fully cognizant of what they are embarking upon with Web services
and making sure they get the greatest ROI on those SOAs and Web
services they decide to use," said Bob Sutor, Director of Websphere
Foundation Software.>>

You can find this at:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/04/21/HNibmsoas_1.html

BEA:

<<San Jose, Calif.-based BEA said it is the only company fully
equipped to deliver SOA solutions today. "While many talk about SOA
being a future trend, BEA customers are already benefiting from SOA
thanks to BEA's technology," a BEA representative said. IBM is slated
to announce an SOA strategy Wednesday, sources said.

<BEA's SOA strategy is wrapped around the BEA WebLogic Platform.
Company officials said only BEA has a unified, standards-based
infrastructure, based on a common set of components—which can be
reused across services and applications—that can quickly help
customers build SOAs.>>

You can find this at:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1571195,00.asp?
kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

Gervas





--- In service-orientated-architecture@yahoogroups.com, "Gervas
Douglas" <GervasDouglas@t...> wrote:
> <<IBM's rival in Java server software, BEA Systems, is expected to
> provide further details next month on Project Sierra, a plan that
> describes the business benefits of an SOA. Oracle earlier this week
> introduced Java development tools to promote a services
architecture.
> Meanwhile, Microsoft's Indigo project, an integral part of the
> upcoming "Longhorn" version of Windows, is meant to enable SOAs.
>
> <Next week, IBM also plans to reveal further detail about its long-
> term plan for providing the tools and services to put SOAs into
> practice. The company is expected to introduce consulting services
> from IBM Global Services intended to help companies make the
> transition to the new systems design, sources said.
>
> <IBM's consulting-driven approach to services-oriented architecture
> reflects the company's belief that SOAs represent a significant
shift
> in computing systems designs, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at
> research company ZapThink. Much like earlier shifts to
client/server
> and Web-based computing, SOAs require companies to rework how they
> design, build and run their business applications.>>
>
> You can find this article at
>
> http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5193153.html
>
> Gervas

----- Original Message -----

From: Gervas Douglas

To: service-orientated-architecture@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2004 5:02 AM

Subject: [service-orientated-architecture] Service-Oriented Architecture: The Future is Now

I have just posted a link to an interesting article by Robert
Eisenberg on the EII Group.  See the link below:








http://groups.yahoo.com/group/enterprise-information-
integration/message/42

Gervas

<<Today's Web services implementations are typically simple and often
similar to a client-server model. However, platform-neutral
interchange is supported, which allows a diverse range of client
implementations to interact with new or legacy code as server
functions. Much has been written about the technologies that make
such applications straightforward to implement. It is now time to
look at the bigger picture of what we can do with them. The author
addresses the question of how to move forward from simple models to
those that represent real-world business models of arbitrary
complexity.

<In 221B.C., Emperor Qin unified several formerly warring states into
a new country, which we now call China. Perhaps one reason China has
endured as a nation was Qin's introduction of standards, which
consolidated cultures and facilitated trade: a standard distance for
wheels on carts which allowed them to travel efficiently on any road,
a common written language that everybody could use to exchange
messages (even if they did not speak the same language), and a strong
defense against outside attacks (like the Great Wall of China). You
could say that he developed the models for standardized transport,
message exchange, and the firewall.>>

There, and you thought that IT was an originally innovative arena of
human activity.

You can find this article at:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-soaintro.html?ca=dnt-
516

Gervas

Of course, the downside of the Qin Dynasty was the Legalism and book
burning.

The development of standards in an open forum hopefully makes us
more like the Confucians (rule by moral persuasion, order from
education)
who were antagonized by the Qin.


On Apr 23, 2004, at 7:48 AM, Gervas Douglas wrote:

> <<Today's Web services implementations are typically simple and often
>  similar to a client-server model. However, platform-neutral
>  interchange is supported, which allows a diverse range of client
>  implementations to interact with new or legacy code as server
>  functions. Much has been written about the technologies that make
>  such applications straightforward to implement. It is now time to
>  look at the bigger picture of what we can do with them. The author
>  addresses the question of how to move forward from simple models to
>  those that represent real-world business models of arbitrary
>  complexity.
>
>  <In 221B.C., Emperor Qin unified several formerly warring states into
>  a new country, which we now call China. Perhaps one reason China has
>  endured as a nation was Qin's introduction of standards, which
>  consolidated cultures and facilitated trade: a standard distance for
>  wheels on carts which allowed them to travel efficiently on any road,
>  a common written language that everybody could use to exchange
>  messages (even if they did not speak the same language), and a strong
>  defense against outside attacks (like the Great Wall of China). You
>  could say that he developed the models for standardized transport,
>  message exchange, and the firewall.>>
>
>  There, and you thought that IT was an originally innovative arena of
>  human activity.
>
>  You can find this article at:
>
> http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-soaintro.html?ca=dnt-
>  516
>
>  Gervas
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>  •  To visit your group on the web, go to:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/
>  
>  • 	 To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> service-orientated-architecture-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>  
>  • 	 Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of
> Service.
>
>

I have just uploaded a couple of files at the request of Dick Brooks
of Systrends which you can find at:








http://groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-
architecture/files/Commercial%20Corner/Commercial%
20WhitepapersArticles/Systrends/

Gervas

-----Original Message-----
From: John Fuller [mailto:jfuller@...]
Sent: 23 April 2004 14:09
To: service-orientated-architecture@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [service-orientated-architecture] IBM's SOA Primer

Of course, the downside of the Qin Dynasty was the Legalism and book burning.

The development of standards in an open forum hopefully makes us

more like the Confucians (rule by moral persuasion, order from education)

who were antagonized by the Qin.

On Apr 23, 2004, at 7:48 AM, Gervas Douglas wrote:

<<Today's Web services implementations are typically simple and often

similar to a client-server model. However, platform-neutral

interchange is supported, which allows a diverse range of client

implementations to interact with new or legacy code as server

functions. Much has been written about the technologies that make

such applications straightforward to implement. It is now time to

look at the bigger picture of what we can do with them. The author

addresses the question of how to move forward from simple models to

those that represent real-world business models of arbitrary

complexity.

<In 221B.C., Emperor Qin unified several formerly warring states into

a new country, which we now call China. Perhaps one reason China has

endured as a nation was Qin's introduction of standards, which

consolidated cultures and facilitated trade: a standard distance for

wheels on carts which allowed them to travel efficiently on any road,

a common written language that everybody could use to exchange

messages (even if they did not speak the same language), and a strong

defense against outside attacks (like the Great Wall of China). You

could say that he developed the models for standardized transport,

message exchange, and the firewall.>>

There, and you thought that IT was an originally innovative arena of

human activity.

You can find this article at:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-soaintro.html?ca=dnt-

516

Gervas

Yahoo! Groups Links

        •       To visit your group on the web, go to:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/

        •       To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:

service-orientated-architecture-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

        •       Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.

<<Prop up IBM's on-demand strategy against the service-oriented
architecture design principle and you'll find similar philosophies on
both sides heavy on integration and flexibility.

<So formally linking the two is a natural, right?

<Industry analysts seem to think so in light of a spate of
announcements from IBM last week regarding new software tools and
services to help enterprises implement an SOA strategy.

<Among the announcements was IBM's new WebSphere Business Integration
Server Foundation, a J2EE-based run-time integration server that
includes native support for the Business Process Execution Language
(BPEL). It also announced assessment and planning services from IBM
Global Services that specifically address SOA.

<Forrester Research vice president and research director Mike Gilpin
said SOA is the No. 1 topic of interest for enterprise architects and
it's also creeping up on the radar screens of CIOs. Having IBM's
marketing and services muscle aboard the SOA bandwagon has SOA
advocates smiling broadly.

<"The exciting thing IBM is saying is that companies need SOA to be
an on-demand business," said ZapThink LLC senior analyst Jason
Bloomberg. "They are trying to convince all their customers to be on-
demand businesses and they're saying they have to have SOA to do
that.">>

You can find this at:

http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26
_gci961433,00.html?track=NL-110&ad=481241

Gervas



--- In service-orientated-architecture@yahoogroups.com, "Gervas
Douglas" <GervasDouglas@t...> wrote:
> IBM:
>
> <<IBM on Wednesday rolled out a series of software and services
> intended to help corporate users more efficiently create and deploy
> SOAs (service-oriented architectures) on their existing
> infrastructures.
>
> <Specifically, the new products and services, the first of what
> company officials claim will be a "blitz" of SOA-related products
> over the next several months, are designed to help customers build
a
> collection of business processes. These business processes hinge on
> reusable and standard interfaces that can integrate applications
> inside a company as well as externally with customers and
suppliers,
> company officials explained.
>
> <"All the services are based around the notion of ensuring that
users
> are fully cognizant of what they are embarking upon with Web
services
> and making sure they get the greatest ROI on those SOAs and Web
> services they decide to use," said Bob Sutor, Director of Websphere
> Foundation Software.>>
>
> You can find this at:
> http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/04/21/HNibmsoas_1.html
>
> BEA:
>
> <<San Jose, Calif.-based BEA said it is the only company fully
> equipped to deliver SOA solutions today. "While many talk about SOA
> being a future trend, BEA customers are already benefiting from SOA
> thanks to BEA's technology," a BEA representative said. IBM is
slated
> to announce an SOA strategy Wednesday, sources said.
>
> <BEA's SOA strategy is wrapped around the BEA WebLogic Platform.
> Company officials said only BEA has a unified, standards-based
> infrastructure, based on a common set of components—which can be
> reused across services and applications—that can quickly help
> customers build SOAs.>>
>
> You can find this at:
> http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1571195,00.asp?
> kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594
>
> Gervas
>
>
>
>
>
> --- In service-orientated-architecture@yahoogroups.com, "Gervas
> Douglas" <GervasDouglas@t...> wrote:
> > <<IBM's rival in Java server software, BEA Systems, is expected
to
> > provide further details next month on Project Sierra, a plan that
> > describes the business benefits of an SOA. Oracle earlier this
week
> > introduced Java development tools to promote a services
> architecture.
> > Meanwhile, Microsoft's Indigo project, an integral part of the
> > upcoming "Longhorn" version of Windows, is meant to enable SOAs.
> >
> > <Next week, IBM also plans to reveal further detail about its
long-
> > term plan for providing the tools and services to put SOAs into
> > practice. The company is expected to introduce consulting
services
> > from IBM Global Services intended to help companies make the
> > transition to the new systems design, sources said.
> >
> > <IBM's consulting-driven approach to services-oriented
architecture
> > reflects the company's belief that SOAs represent a significant
> shift
> > in computing systems designs, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at
> > research company ZapThink. Much like earlier shifts to
> client/server
> > and Web-based computing, SOAs require companies to rework how
they
> > design, build and run their business applications.>>
> >
> > You can find this article at
> >
> > http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5193153.html
> >
> > Gervas

<<In the view of Oracle Vice President of Server Technology Amlan
Debnath, the last ten years have witnessed "a tremendous shift"
toward real-time service oriented architectures.

<And during ebizQ's Optimizing Business Processes in Real-Time with
Event-Driven Architecture webinar, the second in the Oracle-sponsored
Creating an Integrated Enterprise Webinar series, Debnath presented
an end-to-end integration methodology for creating a real-time
service-oriented architecture.

<"As Charles Darwin has put it blithely, `It is not the strongest of
the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one that
is most responsive to change.' And that's exactly what you have to
do," he noted.

<"You cannot incorporate all the events, all the business processes,
all the services on Day One; you have to prioritize and figure out
where you'll get the best bang for your buck," noted Debnath, who
offered a methodology for creating an event-driven service oriented
architecture.>>

You can find an account of this discussion at:

http://www.ebizq.net/topics/soa/features/3181.html

Gervas

Hi
Is correlation supposed only to be used for
asynchronous communication. For example if we have a
long-runnning process that offers 3 synchronous
operations (Initiate, PlaceOrder and Confirm) called
in a specific order to complete a booking. Isnt it
correct to use correlation, so the second and third
operation will reach the same process istanse?

________________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping"
your friends today! Download Messenger Now
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ESB: Just another TLA? ZapFlash

By Ronald Schmelzer
Document ID: ZAPFLASH-04272004 | Document Type: ZapFlash

Analyst firms are often fond of creating new terms that define
constantly shifting markets. After all, such new terms help to
categorize vendor companies into segments that they can easily
quantify and explain in the context of the greater IT marketplace.
They also help the analyst groups organize themselves and their
research.

Many times, however, such analyst-speak is more of a hindrance than a
help. New terminology often introduces ambiguity and confusion in the
market when end-users aren't sure about how to apply the new term to
the vendors they are considering for a particular project. Such
confusion is especially prevalent surrounding the term Enterprise
Service Bus (ESB) that is making its way into the PowerPoint
presentations of vendors very small to very large. Just how useful is
the term ESB? Is it just another Three-Letter Acronym (TLA) of
limited use?

ESBs: What are They?

An ESB is the combination of standards-based messaging middleware,
distributed Service containers that use Web Services, XML
transformation, and rules-based routing of documents. We have also
seen ESBs defined as "a new kind of middleware that combines features
from several previous types of middleware into one package." Previous
types of middleware presumably include message-oriented middleware
(MOM), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and Business-to-
Business (B2B) integration solutions. ESBs also often provide some
value-added services beyond those found in those previous middleware
approaches, such as message validation, transformation, content-based
routing, security, Service discovery for a Service-oriented
architecture (SOA), load balancing, failover and logging.

Yet, despite these attempts at definition, the ESB term is being used
in increasingly more vague and unhelpful ways. For example,
Microsoft's Indigo has been described as an ESB. However, Indigo,
which forms the basis of Microsoft' next-generation development
environment combining SOA as well as advanced code management and
code portability capabilities, is not by itself any more an ESB than
any other development or runtime environment.

Furthermore, companies that have traditionally been in the Enterprise
Application Integration (EAI), Message-oriented Middleware (MOM), and
object brokering markets are increasingly calling upgraded versions
of their existing products ESBs. Does this trend mean that ESBs are a
new technology movement and emerging market that a growing number of
companies are modifying their products to meet, or is it really the
case that ESBs don't represent a new technology approach or market,
but rather the natural evolution of existing middleware
infrastructure as standards-based, loosely coupled distributed
computing approaches take hold?

In order to understand the answer to this question, ZapThink examines
the role of ESBs within the context of SOA, and how the nature and
relevance of ESBs will necessarily change as companies migrate
towards architectures that inherently address the challenge of
integration.

ESBs: A Transitory Market
In order to get an understanding of the role and importance of ESBs,
is it first important to understand the importance of asynchrony. As
we frequently communicate in our research, there are three
fundamental tenets (idées fortes) of SOA: loose coupling, coarse
granularity, and asynchrony. Loose coupling is the discipline that
requires Service consumers to be independently created and controlled
from Service producers; coarse granularity implies that high-level
business Services can be composed of lower-level atomic Services, and
asynchrony is the mandate that Service requesters not wait around for
requests to be processed before continuing on other Service tasks.

In reality, all of these fundamental tenets are directly related to
each other. Loose coupling demands that systems not be aware of each
other's communication protocols and requirements. It is certainly
easier to accomplish this goal using asynchronous messaging
techniques than synchronous, blocking protocols. Furthermore, the
more coarse-grained a business Service becomes, the more long-lived
it tends to be. Rather than enabling a discrete database call, a
coarse-grained Service might represent an entire supply chain
process. These processes depend on asynchrony in order to execute
reliably. Finally, coarse granularity and loose coupling are
themselves connected in that coarse-grained Services are themselves
composed of finer-grained Services that should know nothing about the
processes and composite applications that will use them.

In this regard, ESBs can provide the infrastructural backbone over
which loosely-coupled, asynchronous interactions can happen. Yet, as
mentioned in an earlier ZapFlash, ESBs by themselves don't provide
the required integration to meet high-level business requirements or
provide guarantees of loose coupling and coarse granularity as
required in an SOA. Basically, implementing ESBs to meet SOA
requirements require the addition of extra functionality to compose
fine-grained Services into coarse-grained business Services and
provide policy-driven, managed, and secure Service interactions.

It is for this reason that ZapThink believes that the ESB market is
actually a transitory one. At this time, many companies don't yet
understand the power of standards-based, asynchronous, loosely-
coupled distributed computing that SOAs offer. As a result, such
companies simply want to move away from proprietary integration
approaches to a different approach that represents a step in the
right direction. ESBs fulfill this short-term need, and as a result,
we expect that all tightly-coupled integration vendors will aim to
either provide, or appear to provide, ESB solutions so that they
don't become obsolete.

Yet, as mentioned above, the ESB is not sufficient to provide the
needs of companies implementing SOAs. ZapThink proposes that the real
long-term market opportunity is the SOA Implementation Framework,
which provides all the technology that enterprises need to build and
run an SOA -- process, management, security, modeling, and more. In
fact, as enterprises look to implement SOAs, and vendors work to
produce solutions that enable such architectures, ESBs will combine
with other integration approaches such as Business Process Modeling
(BPM) and Service-Oriented Integration (SOI) to provide an optimal
implementation of an SOA -- one that meets the requirements for
loosely coupled, coarse grained, asynchronous Services.

ZapThink Take

The ESB term is helpful in the short term as companies seek to
understand how to move from their proprietary, tightly-coupled
integration approaches of today to the standards-based, loosely-
coupled, agile infrastructures of tomorrow that solve integration
problems through architectural approaches. In addition, ESBs
represent a viable implementation approach for SOAs that relegate the
application server to a role that is one of executing particular
synchronous Services, while the ESB forms the backbone for
asynchronous inter-Service communication. While ESBs by themselves
don't offer the entire SOA picture that companies will require, they
provide a necessary stepping stone.

In the long term, however, the ESB term is just a means to an end.
Once companies realize that they need the infrastructural
capabilities of an ESB, they will desire the rest of the SOA
Implementation Framework as well, and the functionality of today's
ESBs will shift to solve those requirements. Yet, the fast-and-loose
use of the term ESB, which originally had a reasonably specific
meaning, is now becoming increasingly vague, and ZapThink believes it
will gradually lose its value to the market as a result.

<<During a recent interview with internetnews.com at IBM's Hawthorne,
N.Y., campus, Mills discussed topics that included Big Blue's
approach to helping customers and ISVs build applications on service-
oriented architectures (SOA) (define); what impact, if any, the
bombshell Sun/Microsoft Java settlement might have on IBM's own
investment in Java-based technologies; and how Sun's own NetBeans
project might be improved.

<Indeed, he said he thought the idea of NetBeans and (the formerly
IBM-led) Eclipse project joining forces on open source toolkit
developments would be a helpful addition to the Java open source
question. Sun has been reportedly mulling the move but has opted for
now to stay put with its own NetBeans open source development effort
for toolsets.

<Mills' comments come just weeks after Sun and Microsoft shocked the
industry when they announced a settlement of Sun's long-running
litigation involving Microsoft's use of its own Java licenses. As a
result of the $1.9 billion settlement payment Microsoft has promised
to Sun, the industry is now watching to see how new collaborations
between the two companies could affect standards such as Web
services.>>

You can find an account of this interview with InternetNews at:
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3344811

Gervas

While perusing the IBM developerworks site I came across a list of
open source projects for SOA and Web Services.  Do any of you know of
any other such sources?  The link is below:







http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/views/webservices/projects.jsp

Gervas

<<On April 7, members of the international standards consortium,
OASIS, announced plans to advance a new architecture, leveraging Web
services and SOA, that builds on ebXML (Electronic Business
Extensible Markup Language) and other Web services technology. This
new architecture, called Electronic Business Service Oriented
Architecture (ebSOA) will leverage ebXML Technical Architecture v1.04
as a jumping off point for defining a SOA and how this more modern
technology fits with existing ebXML OASIS Standards.

<If you've been reading my stuff you already know that I'm a big fan
of ebXML, and this move was both predictable and positive. Indeed, if
ebXML is to gain ground on existing and outdated B2B standards, such
as EDI, than the ability to layer easily inside more modern
architectures will be a key selling point. Clearly, everyone now
understands the value of leveraging services; this move just
formalizes how we leverage services to support trade in real-time,
enabling us to remove latency for our business processes.>>

You can find this at:
http://www.ebizq.net/hot_topics/soa/features/4323.html?pp=1

Gervas