Celtix: Open Source Java Enterprise Service Bus

Celtix is an open-source JAVA ESB (Enterprise Sevice Bus). Celtix is developed by IONA Technologies and on December, 22th reached its 3rd milestone.

With the delivery of Milestone 3, the Celtix project compares favourably with available commercial ESBs," explained Carl Trieloff, director, Open Source Programs, IONA. "The Celtix community has delivered robust JMS support and this, combined with the other features made available in Milestone 3, gives end users a powerful, and cost-effective, ESB to support their Service Oriented Architecture and other integration projects.

A good source of information is (of course) the Celtix Wiki. There you can learn to build a simple application using Celtix ESB: "End-to-End HelloWorld" (believe or not!).

How to Implement a Successful SOA Pilot Program

SOAWebServices Jornal presents an interesting article titled "How to Implement a Successful SOA Pilot Program". Dan Foody and Alex Rosen (authors) give us some useful tips about a SOA implementation.
Critical Pre-SOA Initiative Questions

1. How do we phase in and successfully manage the move to SOA within the current IT environment?
2. How do we leverage the existing IT infrastructure and investments in the SOA?
3. What procedures need to be established or modified?
4. Where will policy and security reside?
5. How do we explain the benefits of SOA and provide financial justification to the business stakeholders?
6. How does the move from silos to SOA impact our ability to detect and resolve problems?
7. Who owns shared applications or services and how do we allocate costs and budgets for these services?
8. What do we need to do to ensure our SOA scales from pilot to production? With thorough, up-front planning, a transition to SOA can be achieved efficiently and provide tangible benefits to the enterprise. The following passages will offer guidance in answering the questions listed above.

Critical Question to Answer:

1. What are your primary reasons for using SOA? (To reduce costs? Achieve better flexibility? Enable faster delivery? Improve customer satisfaction?)
2. What is driving your near-term use of SOA? (Connecting your core applications? Integrating with your partners? Providing a single view for customers and/or users? Getting real-time business metrics? Regulatory compliance?)
3. What is the long-term potential for SOA in your organization? (Faster product introductions? Flexible outsourcing? Business process flexibility? Stricter governance? Other?)

10 Steps to SOA

This article from ComputerWorld/Australia briefly point out 10 (good) steps toward SOA.
"True, SOA (service oriented architecture) builds on the stack of protocols that define Web services, but it is hardly limited to that stack and draws as much on time-honoured notions of business "re-engineering" as it does on XML, SOAP, and WSDL. Simply put, SOA is a broad, standards-based framework in which services are built, deployed, managed, and orchestrated in pursuit of new and much more agile IT infrastructures that respond swiftly to shifting business demands."

These 10 Steps would be:
1: Think big, start small
2: Go to the whiteboard
3: Survey your surroundings
4: Connect your first services
5: Deploy registry
6: Start tackling governance
7: Lay your security plans
8: Messaging infrastructure
9: Deploy service management
10: Consider orchestration

Good reading!

Get started now with Eclipse

New to Eclipse? This is an excellent article from IBM/DeveloperWorks:

"Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software. This article gives you links to the latest version of Eclipse, information on IBM's involvement with Eclipse, and a guide to some of the most interesting Eclipse projects. Learn what Eclipse is good for, why it is important, how you can get started, and where to learn more about it."

Main topics:

• What is Eclipse?
• What Eclipse is good for?
• Why is Eclipse important?
• What does IBM have to do with Eclipse?
• What are the Eclipse communities?
• Why should I contribute to Eclipse?
• How can I become an Eclipse committer?
• What should I know about using or contributing to Eclipse?
• What are some Eclipse's interesting projects?
• Who wrote this guide?

The SOA Weblog: Definition of Service-Oriented Architecture

Tired of SOA definitions? Here is another one :-):

In Service-Oriented Architecture autonomous, loosely-coupled and coarse-grained services with well-defined interfaces provide business functionality and can be discovered and accessed through a supportive infrastructure. This allows internal and external system integration as well as the flexible reuse of application logic through the composition of services.

Did you realize that there is no mention to any specific product? I liked it!