SOA Best Practices: A Conversation with Mark Hapner (Sun Engineer)

This is an interesting interview about the point-of-view from SUN about SOA and SOA-related tecnologies (e.g. WS).

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has arrived, and with it have come a faster application development process and the ability to adapt more flexibly to changing business needs. The Gartner Group predicts that "By 2008, SOA will be a prevailing software engineering practice, ending the 40-year domination of monolithic software architecture." So what is SOA? Basically, it's an IT approach in which applications rely on services available on a network such as the web to facilitate business processes. Implementing an SOA can involve developing applications that use services, making applications available as services so that other applications can use those services, or both.

To get up-to-date on the importance of SOA for Java technology developers, we met with Mark Hapner, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, who has served as lead architect of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE, formerly known as J2EE), co-lead of the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) specification, and lead for Java Message Service (JMS). He is currently Sun's chief web services strategist. Hapner also helped create Java Business Integration (JBI) and is Sun's board member on the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I).