LogicLibrary Announces Logidex 3.5 for J2EE and .NET

“Implementing a successful service-oriented architecture requires discipline, governance and teamwork across IT and business organizations,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC. “Business users, application developers, portal developers and security experts all must operate as a cohesive unit in order for an SOA to realize its potential. Software asset management solutions such as Logidex provide the necessary governance and discipline to achieve the desired effects of an SOA, namely IT capabilities that achieve the long sought-after goal of reuse and meet the needs of continuously evolving business requirements.”

Read more at: LogicLibrary Press Release

Bosworth Leaves BEA for Google

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, based in Waltham, Mass., said, “Alchemy is focused on the sometimes-connected client, or basically those Web services consumers who aren’t always on the network. So, to include them in an SOA, one has to use asynchronous messaging protocols and other reliable Web services mechanisms.

“Much of what is written about ESBs centers on the fact that they extend message-oriented middleware with Web services and service container interfaces,” Schmelzer said. “Since message queuing and interacting with heterogeneous, and perhaps sometimes-connected systems, is part of that ESB message, this Alchemy feature set definitely adds some potency to BEA’s offering.”

Read more at: eWeek

Microsoft’s Team System Attracts Partners

“Microsoft is looking to move into the space occupied by the likes of IBM/ Rational and Mercury Interactive [Corp.],” according to Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, in Waltham, Mass. “[With] AmberPoint, Microsoft is giving enterprise developers the ability to monitor Web services and manage Web services exceptions.”

Read more at: eWeek

TECH ED: Borland to encourage developer use of eBay SDKs

It’s unusual for a software development company to partner with a consumer-oriented company to reach out to developers, said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at Zapthink LLC. However, these types of partnerships have become more common recently and signal a trend of lines blurring between traditional software applications and consumer-oriented online services.

The Borland-eBay partnership will be much more interesting if they do expand it and actually provide software integration of Delphi and the SDKs beyond what can be accomplished with the products now, Schmelzer said.

Read more at: IDG News

Service Orientation Market Trends

While Web Services have been getting the attention through 2003, in 2004 the IT computing story will be focused squarely on Service Orientation. Offering an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that provides greater business agility while enabling companies to use heterogeneous resources more efficiently, Service Orientation, based on established Web Services standards, is set to fundamentally change many different IT markets as enterprises transition to Service-Oriented Architectures.

In particular, the markets of application security, security appliances, system management, application integration, data integration, and business process management are six key markets that will become transformed as vendors in those markets Service-enable their products. Furthermore, there is a window of opportunity for new entrants in each of these markets to build Service-oriented offerings. Those windows will soon close, however, as the established, incumbent vendors in each space consolidate their respective markets.

These consolidation trends will continue through the rest of the decade, as large vendors round out their suites of software that support Service Orientation, resulting in a combined market consisting of vendors offering a full-function SOA Implementation Framework. These frameworks will offer enterprises all the functionality they need to build, run, and manage SOAs. The market for SOA Implementation Frameworks is still nascent as of 2004, but will dominate the distributed computing arena by 2010.

Q&A: Mike Devlin, IBM Rational GM

Rational, along with such companies as Microsoft and Borland, is looking to facilitate SOA development with its tools. XML and Web services research firm ZapThink recently estimated SOA-based products would top $43 billion by 2010.

Read more at: Internetnews.com

BEA readying Java Web services technology

“The main point to JSR 181 is to provide for greater simplicity for developers of Web services on a Java platform,” Bloomberg said. “The key to understanding this JSR is that it consists of metadata for describing Web services and is proposed as an instance of the JSR 175 metadata facility for Java. In other words, the Java source code can be commented [on] in a programmatic, rigorous way, providing a consistent way of explaining the Java code to developers.”

Read more at: InfoWorld

Borland Tunes Integration Tool

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, said Borland’s Janeva fits well in the space between legacy applications and Web services.

“Companies are increasingly seeking heterogeneous Web services solutions and offerings that have both .Net and Java support,” Schmelzer said. “Rather than forcing companies to adopt Web services and service-oriented architecture technologies based on the underlying platform, Borland is unique in providing solutions that can help companies make the right application development and deployment platform based on the current situation.”

Read more at: eWeek

Borland advances ALM goals

Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, questioned whether platform independence is a boon to developers in the grand scheme of ALM.

“To have a separate development platform and a separate portal platform … is becoming less and less attractive to developers,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: ComputerWorld

Borland bulks up JBuilder

“Borland is trying to make it so that developers stick with its tools,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink. “Borland’s developers are its strength. They don’t want people migrating to another platform.”

Read more at: InfoWorld