OSOA: Open SOA Collaboration

On August'06 I had already posted a message about OSOA. David Linthicum, in this article details the progress that this initiative has achieved. As David say, this group has concentrated its efforts on two projects - service component architecture (SCA) and service data objects (SDO).

• SCA is looking to provide a model for creating service components in a wide range of languages and a model for assembling service components in a business solution. In essence this is a standard that defines how services are created so they interact with each other without a lot of customization. This will benefit those who are looking to create composite applications that use these services (...SCA stresses decoupling the service implementation and service assembly from the details of the infrastructure capabilities and the access methods used to invoke services. SCA components operate at a business level, according to the spec);
• SDO is looking to provide a consistent way of handling data in applications, whatever its source or format may be. Okay, that would be data abstraction. Moreover, SDO provides a way to unify data handling for databases and services (...using SDO, application programmers can uniformly access and manipulate data from heterogeneous data sources, including relational databases, XML data sources, Web Services, and enterprise information systems).

Continuing with SDO goals:

1. Databases are connected to the applications by data mediator services;
2. Client applications query a data mediator service and get a data graph in response;
3. Client applications send an updated data graph to a data mediator service to have the updates applied to the original data source;
4. and this architecture allows applications to deal principally with data graphs and data objects.

(source: SDO for JAVA Specifitation V2.1 FINAL)

JAVA EE 5, SOA, the bad, the good... (Part 2)

+
This is the Part 2 This Special Report from WebServices.com about JavaEE 5 and Enterprise SOA.

1. The Bad (by Bruce Snyder, co-founder and developer for the Geronimo project and a senior architect at LogicBlaze Inc., an open source SOA provider)

Snyder said enterprise-grade SOA should have flexibility on the back end as well as on the developer side, and by that he means making it easier to do things. "There's a portion of Java EE trying to standardize on that," he said, such as the move toward annotations with the JAX-WS spec. "It's good in terms of standardization, but in terms of flexibility and simplifying things, I'm not sure Java EE 5 does that. I still see people going outside of Java EE to look for solutions."

2. The Good (by Michael Bechauf, vice president of industry standards at SAP AG)

All this said, organizations have to be asking themselves, just how much work is involved in taking existing enterprise apps and componentizing/service-enabling them? And does Java EE 5 make it easier?

"Java EE 5 as a technology platform has made it dramatically easier to service-enable an existing Java application," said SAP's Bechauf. "For example, Java annotations can easily service-enable a Java method. Tools also may help a great deal with the service-enabling. If you wanted to do this with a bare-bones IDE and had to write all of the code yourself using Web service APIs, it could be a fair amount of work. If you were to use a tool which helped automate this process, it would be much easier.

3. A sensate opinion (from J.Bloomberg, ZapThink.com)

Vendors that are part of the EE 5 ecosystem like SAP and JBoss are offering broader capabilities than just Java EE 5, said Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. "You still need scalable, transactional Web sites, and if you want [IBM] WebSphere or [BEA] WebLogic that makes sense, but if you're looking to do SOA you're not going to focus on the same priority. It's what BEA is struggling with as it moved to SOA 360 º, for example. [Vendors] are rethinking what it means to provide a SOA platform."

4. A word from Bill Roth, Vice-President of BEA

While Roth said the company is not looking to distance itself from the Java platform, "are we saying things other than J2EE? Yes, for example an ESB is a useful way to think. There's no J in SOA, it opens up whole new world for us. The SOA world is not necessarily Java. Is Java the most productive platform for creating building blocks in SOA? Of course. Is it the best way to build everything? No.

Roth said he views building composite applications and Java EE 5 as orthogonal. "There are new technologies like Service Component Architecture, which describe how larger services are woven together and BPM [business process management], which talks about how services talk to each other. Java EE 5 [is about] how to build better services, but the process of weaving them together as an SOA is at a much larger level and might not involve Java."

5. And finally, the Importance of Service Component Architecture (SCA), by Richard Monson-Haefel, a senior analyst at Burton Group Inc.

Monson-Haefel said the Service Component Architecture (SCA) initiative "is supported by all the big players in EE space and SCA has little or nothing to do with EE."

SCA supports service implementations written using a variety of programming languages, including object-oriented languages, as well as Java, PHP, C++, and Cobol; XML-centric languages such as BPEL and XSLT; and declarative languages such as SQL and XQuery.

The fact that SCA is implemented on top of Java EE, but "doesn't reference Java EE specifically," is telling, Monson-Haefel said. "I don't have a lot of confidence that SCA will go anywhere, but all the vendors [involved] is indicative they're hedging their bets.

Free BPM Tool from TIBCO (Eclipse Integrated)

TIBCO First to Offer Full-Featured, Eclipse-Based BPM Modeling and Simulation Product for Free
— TIBCO Software Inc. , a leading business integration and process management software company that enables real-time business, today announced that the latest generation of TIBCO Business Studio(TM), version 1.1 is available for free.

More from this article: "To date, commercially available process modeling environments have been too cost-prohibitive for most companies to invest in for non-technical users. The few made available for free are generally not standards compliant, have limited functionality, or do not fit into the current IT infrastructure. As a result, models built in these solutions cannot be executed easily and, in most cases, require significant re-work by IT to ensure compliance with the execution engine. TIBCO Business Studio, version 1.1 is the first fully functional, standards-based process modeling product tailor-made for business users offered at no cost. This eliminates a key barrier to entry by giving organizations an easy, low-risk way to get started with their BPM projects."

The most important, the tool can be download from here!

Make SOA happen or SOA will happen to You

Don't panic, but think about. At Gartner Inc.'s Web Services Summit (Orlando, Fla., Dec'2006), this was a consensus among the analysts.

See the complete report here.

Let's point out some important conclusions:

1. "SOA is not something you chose to do. It will happen to you whether you chose it or not," stated Daryl Plummer, a managing vice president at Gartner;
2. Throughout the first day of the show, Gartner analysts talked up their approach to SOA governance, called SOA Portfolio. "Portfolio is a set of capabilities that you track," Plummer said. "SOA needs to be tracked."
3. According to Ivo Totev, vice president of product marketing for Software AG, "A company that focuses on SOA governance is 20% more likely to have an effectively running business."

Gartner advises to:

1. Start it's governance/management approach with the underlying technical infrastructure of SOA, like middleware and integration protocols;
2. Next in line are the procedures in use, like blueprints, templates and guidelines;
3. The final piece involves composition, which includes business processes and the humans inside a business along with the orchestration of those people and processes.
4. A central registry and repository are critical components of this dashboard. Any service is accounted for, guidelines are put into place and, therefore, the business has an organized system in play.

And finally, "No SOA suite!":

"No vendor has it all. You want SOA your way, not a vendor's way." Eliminating "suite" thinking, according to Plummer, allows for a more organic business processes that can deliver a better ROI.

JAVA EE 5, SOA, the bad, the good... (Part 1)

This Special Report from WebServices.com brings some light to recurrent discussion: at the end, JAVA EE 5 is too complex? EE would be a good option to implement SOA-based project? How well suited is Java EE style to implement lightweight services?

According to this report:

The good:

• Java EE 5 includes several key specifications intended to improve and simplify Web services support. These are: Java API for XML-Based Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.0, Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) 2.0, Web Services Metadata for the Java Platform 2.0 and SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ) 1.3.
• The core tenet of SOA is loose coupling within Web services and without," Kassem said. "In Web services, our [J2EE 1.4] initial foray was very RPC-centric. That dramatically shifted with JAX-WS 2.0, it was an important programming model shift. It enables us to build more loosely coupled Web services that will scale very well for the Web. [It] was a significant SOA-centric initiative. Simultaneously, we [made] significant improvements in the JAXB 2.0 spec to enable better quality data bindings. The quality of bindings is really important. If you don't get the bindings right, you have round-tripping problems in the SOA world that you never get right. We're not completely there, but it's a big improvement.

The Bad:

(from Richard Monson-Haefel) "What we're seeing are the last few years of Java EE as a leading choice in doing enterprise development, which is pretty obvious with the rise of rebel frameworks like Hibernate, Spring, Tapestry and Struts, which don't fall directly under the EE spec. These are indications that programmers are looking for platforms that are easier to work with. There are solutions you can use with Java EE like Struts, and many claim these reinforce EE as a good platform, but they're actually raising the abstraction so developers are working with the framework and not the EE platform programming model."

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, said, "In the big picture in the SOA world, people are moving away from Java EE 5. It's becoming less and less relevant. EE is essentially an architecture for building scalable, transactional Web sites. It's not designed for SOA. More people are understanding the limitations, and realizing there are other Java-based approaches. We're not seeing anybody interested in JAX-WS and JAXB. We are seeing open source Java suites as appropriate for SOA. It depends on what you're trying to accomplish, but we see a lot of use of elements of open source ESBs and Hibernate for various parts of the Java infrastructure. What we're not seeing is interest in Java EE."

SOA Presentation and Workshop at São Paulo (BR)

This week me and Denis Bertoluci (Software Architect Mgr), on behalf of Transit Telecom, presented a pratical case and a workshop at IQPC's SOA&WebServices summit. My presentation was about the SOA project that we are heading at Transit e Denis gave a 2 hours workshop (with pratical example) regarding the open-source alternatives to implement Service-oriented Architecture.