Pro wrestling legend Rowdy Roddy Piper immortalized the words “Just when they think they’ve got the answers, I change the questions.”

Now we at SearchSOA.com are asking you to do the same thing, sort of. It won’t involve wearing a kilt or smashing a coconut over anyone’s skull. We just want you to ask some good questions.

We’ve recently revamped our site experts roster and we’re looking to put them through their paces. The way it works is you ask a question and we send the question off to an expert to get you an answer. It’s a fairly illustrious list of folks:

• SOA standards and architecture - Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group
• SOA governance and BPM - Sri Nagabhirava, founder and chief architect nLeague Services
• SOA infrastructure - Dana Gardner, principal analyst Interarbor Solutions
• RIA and enterprise mashups - Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst ZapThink
• SOA testing and QA - Rami Jaamour, product manager of SOA solutions at Parasoft
• Data services - Larry Fulton, senior analyst at Forrester Research
• SOA development - Chris Haddad, vice president and service director at Burton Group

They’re already producing some top flight insight, like data integration best practices, where grid intersects SOA and the difference between WSDL 1.1 and 2.0. Yet good answers like that depend on good questions from the user community. We sift through heaping piles of “What’s the difference between an application server and a Web server?” (a perfectly legitimate question, but we answered it back in 2003) in order to get some of the top minds in the SOA space the best questions the user base can generate.

The process for submitting a question is simple. Just go to the topic where your question fits and click on “Pose a Question.” That will take you to a question submission form. After that, it’s as simple as typing in your query. Keep us busy. We like it that way.

Java EE 6, now in the development stage, needs to embrace the service component architecture (SCA) specification, argues Sanjay Patil, standards architect at SAP AG.

The Java Community Process Web page for Java EE 6 indicates that SCA is being considered for the next version of the enterprise platform. So in a conversation at this week’s Java One with the SAP standards guru, SearchSOA editors asked Patil if consideration should move to implementation.

Should SCA be part of Java EE 6?

“I certainly think it should,” Patil answered. “The main reason is SCA is really about assembling applications in a technology neutral way. If it was about a specific platform, such as Java EE, you could say there are enough APIs and libraries for Java applications. But if you look at the key value of SCA it’s about recognizing the fact that customers have different technologies, Java EE, BPEL, BPM systems, traditional EAI systems. They have a variety of communications mechanisms including Web services, JMS, and EDI.”

Facilitating SOA development in these heterogeneous environments was the driver behind the creation of the SCA specification by a vendor group that included SAP, IBM, Oracle Corp., and BEA Systems Inc. SCA is now making its way through the standards process at OASIS.

While there was a dearth of official talk about enterprise Java in the Java One keynote, Patil said the Java Enterprise Edition will be a major player in service component development.

“One of the main component technologies is going to be Java EE,” he said. “Our NetWeaver product is based on Java EE 5. So in our view it is important that Java EE support this high-level composition standard, SCA.”

In front of a packed room of a few hundred developers at the 2008 JavaOne conference yesterday, IBM’s Jean-Sebastien Delfino gave a presentation of the Apache Tuscany project, an open source implementation of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) standard. SCA is designed to facilitate a standard method of constructing, assembling and developing composite services and the Tuscany implementation (currently in version 1.2) looks to be ridiculously easy to use.

One of the mantras in the SOA space is that it’s hard to do. Sure enough, enterprise architecture and end-to-end governance come with a high degree of difficulty, but Tuscany seemingly has made it a snap to stitch together a composite, Web-based service. According to Delfino, the idea is to abstract away the plumbing details using HTML-style annotations and map out the business logic of the service.

Version 1.2 of Tuscany (which also leverages the Service Data Objects specification) has added distributed SCA domain management, an Eclipse plug-in, Atom binding through Apache Abdera project, improved JMS binding and an OSGi runtime. Delfino used Tuscany for a demo of a fruit store which starts with an online catalog and shopping cart. For those functions he used carrot tags to name the components and declare their implementations, properties and bindings. The transport protocols could be switched just by changing a tag, Delfino chose Atompub and JSON-RPC. He noted that he was running the service a Java SE environment, saying “It doesn’t have to run in a big app server. … Basically you have an Ajax app designed as a set of SCA components.” He added the whole process takes about 15 minutes.

Then he showed how to add a new component class (vegetables in this case) and a database, the latter of which involved another Atompub feed. After that he added a third-party supplier to the service by inserting a single SOAP binding line. “You can point to a WSDL if you want or specify policies,” he said.

Finally he showed off some widget functionality Tuscany has added to the SCA process, allowing the service to communicate with HTML.

Of the widget he said, “This is still an SCA component. It still talks to the catalog. You don’t need to change the model to speak to the client side.”

It should be interesting to see what the adoption rate for Tuscany is during the rest of the calendar year, particularly in terms of who uses it, because it comes across as being a fairly simple service creation tool. Basically, if you can handle some basic HTML coding, it would seem you’ve got the savvy to use Tuscany.

I’m heading out to the JavaOne conference this week and it struck me that Java has had a very quiet year. Two years ago Sun launched Java EE 5 and almost immediately analysts began to call it a heavyweight dinosaur not likely to survive in an SOA world. Sun and others insisted Java would become more modular in the future, but last year Sun concentrated mostly on client development during JavaOne and it’s most momentous move during that past 12 months was to acquire MySQL, which doesn’t exactly point to any new directions for Java.

So what tea leaves can we read? I asked Brad Shimmin over at Current Analysis his thoughts and he said:

My impression with Java’s momentum is that it has reached a point where the platform needs to remain “consistent” top to bottom while affording specialization — much as Spring specialized as an alternative to EJB. I think Java EE 6 heads in this direction greatly with a highly modular approach that lets ISVs certify against particular aspects of the standard. That’s a good thing. Look at GlassFish for a vision of where this whole modularity thing is heading with its use of OSGi.

Well, sure enough, GlassFish v3 has OSGi support and a bunch of cool little subprojects like RESTful Web services, XML pipeline processing and an Ajax UI. Might we see the relationship between OSGi (and probably the Eclipse Foundation) and Java deepen? Now that would be revolutionary. The JCP page on Java EE 6 also mentions that Service Component Architecture could be part of the Java enterprise platform in the future.

Yet it makes you wonder if Java EE 6 has as much to offer the world as GlassFish v4 … or v5 even. Back in 2005, Sun had two hot new kids on the technology block - GlassFish and JBI. While JBI hasn’t gone much of anywhere, Sun continues to push and innovate with GlassFish. Why break a winning streak? What more can be done with the open source application server? Perhaps the biggest news this week won’t be what’s new for Java, but what’s coming up in GlassFish.

In the early days of client/server adoption in the 1990s there were lots of articles lamenting the fact the client/server wasn’t living up to its promise. It was just another theory that didn’t really work all that well in practice.

But after a few years client/server was just the way application development was being done. It wasn’t a theory any more, and too some extent it ceased to be a hot topic for debate. It was old hat.

New technologies including XML, Web services and finally SOA became the hot topics. Of course, as a Gartner Inc. analyst pointed out in a talk a few years ago, SOA pretty much began in the mid-1990s as an extension of client/server.

“Customers were doing SOA then although they weren’t calling it that,” Massimo Pezzini, vice president and distinguished analyst Gartner Inc., said in a 2006 talk. They tended to use the terms of the 1990s for their projects, calling them client/server. Pezzini said that is the secret few SOA gurus want to let out of the bag: SOA is an update of classic client/server.

In a recent article about the problems with SOA adoption, Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., also credits Gartner with the transformation of client/server into SOA in 1996.

So it seems client/server, which didn’t live up to its promise, has morphed into SOA, which isn’t living up to its promise. But lots of organizations did client/server even if they did it imperfectly, and it appears organizations are now doing SOA albeit imperfectly.

The nature of things humans do is that they are generally not perfect and almost always could be better. With the exception of 4.0 students, most of us got educated imperfectly. The interstate highway system in the U.S. is far from perfect but we’ve been getting around on it for decades. City planning, which Schmelzer says may be the best analogy to SOA because both are always works in progress, does not produce perfect cities. But it could be argued that city planners in many cases help design more liveable and workable cities.

Interviews with CTOs, architects and developers who are actually doing SOA indicates that progress is being made despite the lack of perfection.

In a user story this week Manny Montejano, CTO at Cars.com explained how he is achieving the elusive SOA goal of getting business executives and managers to drive SOA initiatives. But at the same time, he pointed out that his SOA implementation is only about 30 percent of the way to achieving its ultimate goals. And there have been bumps in the road but he views them not as failures but as learning experiences.

 ”I’m not saying we’ve done everything perfectly every single time from the get-go, which is where our lessons come from,” Montejano said. “We’ve learned lots of lessons specifically that this is a business initiative not an IT/technical initiative.” 

Most of the people who are actually doing SOA talk about it in turns of evolution, or to use Schmelzer’s city planning analogy, an on-going project that is always changing and evolving but is never complete.

Shibashis Mukherjee, lead enterprise architect at Con-Way Inc., the transportation company, actually began work in 1996 on what has become his company’s SOA implementation. 

In his account of more that a decade of working on the evolution, Mukherjee recalled: “We started with the component-based development methodology. At that time SOA wasn’t the big thing yet. We realized it would help us develop faster if we had reusable components to build applications. As our development process matured and SOA came into play, we figured out how to compose the services.”

Perhaps if SOA is viewed as a process we would be less impatient with its lack of perfection.

Last August I noted that Microsoft regularly finds itself buried under an avalanche of news coming from its Java-based competition. It’s impossible to compete with that kind of volume and that fact alone has caused the SOA market to gravitate toward Java and away from .NET.

Well, something similar is happening this year with open source vs. proprietary vendor in 2008, but, in what should be considered a bit of a stunner, it’s the open source folks who are creating the news deluge. It started innocently enough when Mulesource and WSO2 both released REST-based SOA registries. Then Red Hat released a modularized SOA platform in February. Now WSO2 and Mulesource are back with another major round of announcements. Based on its December Spring Integration release, you can expect SpringSource to become an increasingly visible player in the SOA market. Sun Microsystems will surely have some service-oriented dogs and ponies to show off at next month’s JavaOne conference and Eclipse, which has already debuted the Swordfish SOA runtime this year, will have a whole slate of SOA-enabled tools in its June Ganymede release.

The open source players are pounding away at the news cycle, throwing a steady stream of innovation into the mix. Obviously traditional app dev titans still dominate the market in terms of dollars and customers, but it’s about time somebody noted that we’ve got a movement on our hands. If you’re looking to build loosely coupled services, there are a host of open source vendors to choose from and that ecosystem is growing at an aggressive rate.

Change, particularly in an established market, doesn’t come in one big seismic event. It takes years of consistent pressure to remake this kind of landscape, but to be sure, we are in a period of volcanic activity for the open source market.

Two interconnected debates are raging in the blogsphere over how service-oriented architecture (SOA) may be running into resistence in 2008.

One debate covered this week in a SearchSOA article is about whether SOA is reaching it’s goal of linking IT and business people, or is just becoming an IT-only initiative that is stalling out in most companies.

The other related debate concerns whether the R-word a.k.a “the current economic downturn” will hurt SOA adoption.

These questions were raised when Gordon Van Huizen, vice president of SOA at Progress Software Corp., called this week discussing how his company is putting all its SOA products under the umbrella of the Progress SOA Portfolio.

The portfolio offers a broader SOA marketing message by covering all the Progress products for:

·         Enterprise service bus (ESB)

·         Business process management (BPM)

·         Complex Event Processing (CEP)

·         Registry/repository

·         SOA management

·         Data interoperability

·         Mainframe integration

From a sales and marketing perspective this seems like a good approach. But Van Huizen was asked about the larger marketing challenge posed by current economic conditions.

Does Progress have a strategy for coping with hard times?

“We have this built-in strategy at Progress that is relatively unique,” Van Huizen said.

He noted that his company’s Open Edge development platform is sold through an ISV channel that has been in place for a long time. The 1,500 ISVs target “very specific, narrowly defined segments of vertical industries.”

By throwing the net so wide, the ISVs reach customers in a variety of industries, not all of which are hurting in this economy, he explained.

“So if there’s a slow down in financial services we don’t feel it so much in that product line,” Van Huizen said. This is also true of the SOA products, he added.

“Our orientation to the market was initally around financial services and telco, perhaps because of the messaging orientation of Sonic MQ,” he said. ”But with the SOA management product, with Actional, there’s been opportunities to branch well beyond that.”

The Progress SOA Management product is penetrating into healthcare and higher education, two areas generally considered recession proof, he noted.

“As one part of the market goes down others remain somewhat boyant,” Van Huizen said. “So if there’s an offsetting strategy I believe we have one. Of course, if everything tanks, we’re all in trouble for awhile, and that’s just the way it goes.”

As for the other related debate about how to keep SOA from stalling out even in companies that have the budget to do it, Van Huizen suggested two strategies.

The first one is to reach across from IT to business people by explaining SOA not in terms of technology with acronyms, but through business case studies that show the dollars and sense success of the approach.

The second is to begin SOA projects at a tactical level, even as simple as application integration, sometimes called EAI 2.0. This allows IT to show the business managers and executives the advantages of SOA without asking them to shell out big bucks for a massive implementation.

These two approaches are also echoed in a recent blog by analyst Joe McKendrick, who quotes fellow analyst Tony Baer’s view that this will be a year of lower expectations for SOA.

“Recessions tend to discourage the kind of long-term thinking that grand enterprise architectural exercises are supposed to support,” Baer said. ”In that sense, SOA has been caught up in the middle - roughly six years after the current incarnation of the concept emerged with Web services, there remains considerable debate as to whether it makes sense to take a project or architectural approach.”

However, McKendrick makes the interesting point: “It’s worth noting that the case for SOA, in tandem with Web services, was forged during the worst IT spending slump in a generation - the 2000-2002 time period. Companies and IT professionals were attracted to the SOA/Web services concepts because they offered the attractive advantage of building or exposing existing applications at minimal cost and disruption.”

This podcast with Mulesource CEO Dave Rosenberg covers the role of the enterprise service bus (ESB) inside an SOA. Rosenberg notes that an ESB shouldn’t be thought of as a singular piece of software sitting in the middle of every application, tossing aside the hub-and-spoke model from the EAI world that often gets grafted onto SOA. He stresses that SOA “is not about integration,” but rather a sensible infrastructure that can handle modular development and changing business needs.

Other topics covered in this interview include:

• How users are more likely to have an “enterprise service network” with multiple ESBs rather than a single or master ESB
• The role of open source in SOA development
• Why neither the Java EE nor .NET meets are well-suited to service orientation
• The roadmap for the Mulesource, particularly in the management area
• What constitutes “SOA infrastructure”
• Data issues, including getting data out of 3rd party SaaS applications

At EclipseCon this week, the Eclipse Foundation announced that it is forming a new open source community project “to develop and promote open source runtime technology based on Equinox, a lightweight OSGi-based runtime.”

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, told SearchSOA that this is important news for architects and developers working on service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects for three reasons:

1. “OSGi itself and Equinox as its implementation has a service-oriented component to it. It is a technology that you use to pull together services in a runtime.
2. “EclipseLink, which provides persistence to enterprise applications for storing either relational data or XML Schema supports the acronyms enterprise architects love like FDO [Feature Data Objects]. You can get implementations of that specification through EclipseLink.
3. “It is part of the Eclipse Swordfish project, which is a full SOA runtime.”

When Swordfish was announced earlier this year, Anne Thomas Manes, research director for Burton Group Inc., said OSGi added “real value” and is a good fit for the Eclipse plug-in philosophy.

“There’s a lot of nice features to OSGi,” Manes told SearchSOA. “You deliver software in something called a bundle. As part of the bundle it identifies the manifest of all the things that are in there and also identifies the dependencies that this code has. Then the OSGi runtime can look at it and say in order to deploy this I have to get these things that are listed in the dependencies, and get those installed first. It’s a very clean and elegant way to package stuff up. The idea here is that you are going to package up services using OSGi.”

There is currently a discussion thread on TheServerSide.com regarding Equinox, EclipseLink, OSGi and its relation to the Java Community Process work on the Java Persistence API (JPA 2.0).

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) expertise is still not available off-the-shelf.

That’s the reason Red Hat Inc. bought Amentra Inc., a integration services provider headquartered in Richmond, VA., which specializes in providing SOA knowledge transfer for its clients. In making this deal, Red Hat is betting that Amentra can provide the consulting services needed to support JBoss,  the middleware company Red Hat acquired two years ago.

In a recent Q&A interview at JBoss World, Craig Muzilla, vice president of middleware business at Red Hat, talked about the pain points organizations run into when tackling SOA.

In an interview after the Amentra deal closed this week, Muzilla stressed how important SOA expertise is to the middleware market in general and JBoss in particular.  He said companies making the transition from legacy mainframe or client/server to SOA often lack the expertise in-house to do the job.

“Amentra has a unique methodology focused around knowledge transfer,” he said. “Not only do they help design SOA and help the customer do some projects and implement project, but they also transfer that knowledge so the customer can be more self-sufficient.”

Bradley F. Shimmin, principal analyst of application infrastructure at Current Analysis LLC. agreed that knowledge transfer is one of the strengths Amentra adds to Red Hat and JBoss. Saying that this acquisition is “a perfect fit for Red Hat,” he noted that existing consulting services for JBoss had relied heavily on partnerships, and were not a match for the consulting services offered by the larger SOA vendors, such as IBM. The Amentra acquisition will begin to help close that gap.

Providing consulting in support of JBoss may be critical if Red Hat is too rearch its announced goal of capturing 50 percent of the enterprise middleware market by 2015.

In the blogsphere, Red Hat has received some criticism for its marketing of the JBoss products, which Muzilla sought to clear up earlier this week on Dana Blankenhorn’s ZDNet blog.

After the Amentra deal was announced, Larry Dignan, also blogging on ZDNet, wrote: “The deal, announced Thursday, gives Red Hat some foot soldiers to sell the company’s stack of software including JBoss. which has been a tough sell.” 

Of course, Amentra is not on a par with something like IBM Global Services.

Shimmin notes that Amentra is based on the East Coast and that is where most of its clients are located, although it is doing work as far West as Chicago and Texas. The company is looking at expanding further West to the Pacific Coast. Plans to have any European or international operations seem to fall into the yet-to-be-determine category.