Microsoft donates code to Apache Stonehenge project

“In general, this is a big issue. The whole point of standards is to provide for interoperability, but so many are implemented in slightly different ways that the desired interoperability is not achieved,” said ZapThink managing partner Jason Bloomberg.

In many ways, that lack of standards interoperability is slowing down Web services efforts, and SOA has now outpaced Web services due to the standards challenge being faced, he added.

Standards interoperability is what allows mobile phones to work anywhere in the world, Bloomberg noted. “Imagine what has to happen to make that work. Handsets are working with local providers across infrastructures. In IT, there is nothing like that. It is still using stone knives and bearskins compared to the telecommunications world’s leverage of standards.”

Read more at: SD Times

Web services-based app server upgraded by WSO2

WSO2 Application Server is differentiated by being built from the ground up for Web services and SOA, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink.

“What’s most notable in version 2.0 is the Eclipse integration, better clustering and high availability, support for EJB services, better security, and data services. Perhaps the most notable of these improvements are the data services, which help service-enable relational data from a variety of heterogeneous sources,” Bloomberg said.

“We’re finding that dealing with heterogeneous data issues is one of the technical stumbling blocks for many SOA implementations, and WSAS should help many enterprises address those issues,” Bloomberg said.

Read more at: InfoWorld

The SOA Forecast for 2007

For those in the United States, 2007 has started out with a bang — two major snow storms in the Rocky Mountains and a persistent warm front that’s keeping the entire East Coast in unusually warm weather for this time of year. Even more so, it’s football season in the …

JBoss Continues SOA Push

Some consider the Synapse project an SOA platform itself, which can be confusing, said Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst with research firm ZapThink. Part of the problem, he said, is there’s no clear definition of what makes an SOA platform.

“JEMS has a very different value proposition from Synapse, so it doesn’t make much sense to use the same term for both,” he said. “JEMS is a coordinated collection of components, including Tomcat, Hibernate, Eclipse, jBPM, JBoss Portal and others that provide a broad set of distributed computing capabilities.

“Add a registry/repository, distributed intermediaries, and run-time management and you’d have much of the infrastructure you’d need for a successful SOA implementation.”

Synapse might complement JEMS more than it competes with it, Bloomberg added, because it has a narrower focus on distributed intermediaries.

Read more at: InternetNews

Synapse to provide open source Web services mediation

But considering some of the market confusion around the definition of an ESB, positioning Synapse as a mediation framework “may help clear up some confusion,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. “The concept of a Web services intermediary is core to the way you build an SOA. The intermediary notion is really how you build loose coupling into a service. You might have a consumer send a request and you don’t want it to go directly to the provider of a service if there are compatibility issues; you may need to change the version of SOAP, for example. Without an intermediary, you won’t have loose coupling.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Apache Launches Open Source Software-Integration Project

Use of open-source software in place of vendors’ products, however, means an enterprise would more likely have to hire a services firm to help in stitching together the various components into a full integration system, Jason Bloomberg, analyst for researcher ZapThink LLC, said.

“It’s similar to choosing whether to go to a car dealership and drive a car off the lot, or buy the parts and build it yourself,” Bloomberg said. “Most people would prefer to buy it off the lot.”

The upside to open-source alternatives, however, is more flexibility in customizing the software, since all the source code is available, experts say. Open-source software also doesn’t carry any licensing costs, but maintenance and support over a long period of time could mitigate those savings.

Either way, projects like Synapse do pressure commercial vendors to offer customers better deals.

“It raises the bar for commercial products, because vendors have to offer value on top of what open-source solutions can give you,” Bloomberg said.

Read more at: TechWeb