Sun SOA roadmap focuses on B2B

However, the Sun announcement, which proclaims this as an “SOA offering,” is still basically SeeBeyond’s B2B product with little if any service-orientation, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC.

“Note that other than ‘enabling enterprises to realize the benefits of a SOA infrastructure framework,’ there’s really nothing service-oriented about this announcement,” Bloomberg said. “It’s squarely centered on traditional B2B integration.”

The analyst did credit Sun with a strong identity management product, which now is integrated with the mature SeeBeyond-developed technology.

“Sun’s identity management capabilities have always been the strongest part of their software offering, and the JavaCAPS, nee SeeBeyond suite, is now a mature product, but nobody should think that these products are particularly suited to the loosely-coupled, interoperability-centric world of SOA,” Bloomberg said.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Eclipse joins JCP, OMG and OSGi alliance

“Eclipse is definitely reaching out to Sun and this will benefit Java developers in terms of greater flexibility and increased choice,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. “I think the timing is the result of the progress Sun is making toward open-sourcing Java. As that initiative progresses, I’d expect to see greater synergies across the board between Java and various open source and vendor neutral efforts.”

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Enterprise Mashups Get Caught in the Web 2.0

“There are two different worlds talking about these things that are now colliding violently,” explained ZapThink senior analyst and principal Jason Bloomberg. “On the one hand, you have the whole Web 2.0 thing, which is consumer-oriented, it’s collaborative, it’s Web-based…. There are a few business models out there, but they’re mostly graphical and they mostly take advantage of mapping capabilities. The other world is the world of SOA,” he continued, where IT groups are “looking to build loosely coupled services that abstract various sorts of IT capabilities across the organization, with the purpose of composing these into a service-oriented business application [SOBA]. What’s happening in the SOBA world is that we’re shifting to a greater focus on the service consumer, which is now [a] piece of software.”

But for it to be useful in the enterprise, it requires more than just APIs and XML, Bloomberg contends. “The overlap between the Web 2.0 world and the enterprise world is what we call the ‘enterprise mashup.’ What makes them ‘enterprise’ is that the services are loosely coupled; that is, they’re managed, they’re secure, there’s governance in place to deal with…the policies that apply to how organizations use services,” he said.

“Governance is really the key,” Bloomberg continued, “because no enterprise is just going to allow anyone to put any service they want together, however they like, the way you would with Google Maps. In the enterprise, services have sensitive information, and sensitive capabilities. You can’t just take the free-for-all… aspect of Web 2.0 and import it into the enterprise, without thinking through the whole governance question.”

Read more at: SD Times

The top SOA/Web services stories of 2006, part 2

“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.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Special report: Java EE 5 faces the SOA test, part 3

However, Bruce Snyder, co-founder and developer for the Geronimo project and a senior architect at open source provider LogicBlaze Inc., said he is still seeing “people going outside of Java EE to look for solutions. That’s why customers are coming to us, why open source projects are there. The upgrade from 1.4 to Java EE 5 is a major shift from RPC-style Web services to annotated Web services. That’s good, but it’s just following what the open source community was already doing. And there are still a lot of organizations out there that run Java 1.4. Java EE 5 requires an upgrade to Java 1.5.”

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, said he’s “not seeing anybody interested in JAX-WS and JAXB. The Java world is getting very diverse, both on the commercial side and open source. It’s also getting noisy, which is an opportunity for Microsoft.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Sun ’simplifies’ Java EE, but are its glory days at an end?

Some industry observers have said Java EE is becoming irrelevant, or not applicable, in the world of SOA. As reported in this blogsite, analysts such as Burton Group’s Richard Monson-Haefel have said that “SOA and Web services diminished the importance of what you have running on the backend.” Monson-Haefel also predicted that in five years, Java EE will be on the way out, replaced by more lightweight frameworks such as Ruby on Rails. ZapThink’s Jason Bloomberg also observed that “the Java EE world is fundamentally not built for SOA.”

Read more at: ZDNet

Special report: Java EE 5 faces the SOA test, part 2

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.”

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Is the new Java SE 6 more SOA-friendly than Java EE 5?

Java SE 6 is also being promoted by Sun for “building Web 2.0 applications and services,” according to Rich Green, executive vice president of software at Sun. Java SE 6 includes a new framework and developer APIs to allow mixing of Java technology with scripting languages, such as PHP, Python and Ruby as well as JavaScript for the trendy new Web 2.0 collaboration applications, such as corporate wikis. Sun said Java SE 6 also supports Web services specifications, including JAX-WS 2.0, JAXB 2.0, STAX and JAXP.

However, Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. is less than impressed. “There’s not all that much to say here,” the analyst said. “The XML technology in Java SE 6 now supports the W3C DOM APIs, parsing of XML documents and transforming XML documents via XSLT, important nuts and bolts XML manipulation capabilities that will ease developers’ XML tasks. But these new capabilities are not Web services-specific and don’t have much direct relevance to SOA.”

While Bloomberg is underwhelmed, Raven Zachary, a senior analyst and head of the open source practice at The 451 Group in Minneapolis, says Java SE 6 may be all that most SOA and Web services application developers need for their projects. In Zachary’s view developers can go with the standard edition and leave the more complex enterprise edition alone.

“In the Web-centric world you want as simple a programming model as possible for developers,” he said. “For a lot of new developers, enterprise edition Java is quite daunting. It’s simpler to move to the use of standard edition. There’s not a lot they’re going to miss if they decide to go with the standard edition deployment. They’re going to get the features and functionality that they need for a robust application with standard edition.”

ZapThink’s Bloomberg agrees. “Java EE really doesn’t have much to offer developers in the context of a SOA implementation, beyond the basic Java capabilities in Java SE,” he said.

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Special report: Java EE 5 faces the SOA test, part 1

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.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Oracle OpenWorld 2006: The Tech Conference that Ate San Francisco

”This movement toward application modernization has a lot of legs,” says Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst and founder of ZapThink. ”A lot of companies are still using client-server applications and mainframe applications that never made the transition to the Web. Some of these applications command a high cost of ownership, because they lack flexibility and they use proprietary technologies. Now is the right time [to transition those apps], and SOA is the right strategy.”

Read more at: Application Development Trends