“People have gone from ‘What is SOA?’ to ‘How do I do SOA?’” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC. “Businesses like the concept. It makes sense.”

Schmelzer positioned governance as “the only way to avoid chaos, which IT already has enough of.”

He said that ungoverned Web services usage could create myriad problems, using the example of the Google Maps API as an example.

“What happens if Google changes the API?” he asked. “Does everything break? How would you know? How do you fix it?”

Schmelzer looked at the testing and rich client spaces as rife for acquisition in 2007, particularly the latter.

“All the new startups are doing composite application development,” he said.

It started with a blast, when analysts this summer predicted the demise of the Java enterprise platform. Obviously vendors begged to differ, but the reality of the new SOA world order is that Java EE 5 needs to prove itself. Along the way, we polled some of the big brains at Sun like James Gosling and Kevin Schmidt about how Java and its enterprise platform can play in a modular SOA universe where lightweight solutions are encouraged.

“How is a developer supposed to be productive with this huge thing?” Schmelzer asked. “At what point is it enough? It would have been like continuing to mess with the HTML spec.”

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