Service-Oriented Data Access

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to organizing IT resources and data to meet the changing needs of the business. Implementing SOA depends upon the IT organization being able to build interoperable, robust, reusable, and composable Services that abstract the underlying application functionality and data in the organization. To put this building block vision of SOA into practice requires a solid technical foundation, which includes a persistence layer that facilitates interaction with heterogeneous data sources that store and provide the structured and unstructured information that the enterprise runs upon.

The key to enabling SOA with such a persistence layer, in turn, depends upon abstracting access through data access technology. Technologies such as JDBC, ODBC, and ADO.NET play an integral role in the design and development of a SOA Data Services strategy. With best-of-breed data access technology in place, the organization stands a good chance of succeeding with their SOA efforts. If an organization drops the ball on data access, however, it’s unlikely the Services will exhibit the key building block characteristics the organization needs to meet their agility requirements.

Interview with ZapThink (on the LZA Boot Camp)

Last week in Baltimore, MD, I was lucky enough to attend the ZapThink SOA Architect BootCamp (check out http://www.zapthink.com/lza.html). This was held in the Mt Washington Conference Center which is part of Johns Hopkins University.

A few days later, in Washington D.C., I caught up with Ron Schmelzer, Senior Analyst at ZapThink for a quick interview

Read more at: PowerBuilder Journal

IT companies are hooking up like divorcees at a Vegas wedding chapel

The ZapThink guys have it right that this is only the second inning (given the weather, it can’t be too soon for baseball metaphors) of a nine-inning outing of SOA components and supplier consolidation.

Read more at: ZDnet

Tech giants get behind new SOA programming model

ZapThink LLC analyst Ron Schmelzer believes the details of how the model works are less important than who’s behind it and what its implications are.

“These companies are getting together to define common services and a common architecture,” he said. “Back in 2004 you might have been right to be a little skeptical about SOA, but these are some of the biggest vendors in the industry coming together to put this stake in the ground. We’re now well past the hype days.”

In fact, Schmelzer argued that IT shops that are slow to adopt to SOA “might have the rug pulled out from under them by their own vendors, which are all moving quickly in this direction.”

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Iona takes lead in new Eclipse SOA project

There are some unique aspects to SOA development versus traditional component development, said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, Waltham, Mass. “The most important asset is the contract — the meta data, documents that describe how something works. There are not many good tools for creating meta data. Most vendors are producing their own tools. So one common environment makes sense, as long as you have a bunch of people willing to support what comes out of it.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Corel Sheds XML Business

ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg said the offloading makes sense given the heavy competition, as IBM/Rational, (Quote, Chart) Borland, (Quote, Chart) Sybase, (Quote, Chart) Sun, (Quote, Chart) and Microsoft are building full XML capabilities, narrowing the opportunity for stand-alone XML tools.

“Corel has long been strong on the desktop, but their eminence on the server-side has never really been shown,” said ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer. “Their entry into XML and Web Services market clearly is coming to an end, from an independent product perspective, with the sale of the XMetal product and the absorption of Smart Graphics into the rest of their product line (they’re no longer selling this product separately). With Corel exiting the market, it looks as though the only contenders selling XML and Web Services products for enabling desktop productivity are Microsoft and Adobe…”

Read more at: InternetNews

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.

XML Database Options

IBM’s DB2, Oracle Corp.’s Oracle9i, Microsoft Corp.’s SQL Server and Sybase Inc.’s Sybase all offer some XML enablement for their relational databases, says analyst Ron Schmelzer at ZapThink, and all four are moving toward native XML support. As they do, they will compete with Software AG’s Tamino, which he calls the leading native XML database.

Read more at: ComputerWorld

XML Gets Organized

Until they develop native XML support, major database vendors offer translation layers that either “shred” the XML document into small enough components to store in the fields of a relational database, or “cram” the entire XML document into a single field, according to Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, a market research firm in Waltham, Mass.

Eventually, Schmelzer says, all major database vendors will offer native XML support. But to be truly native, the database must be able to take any arbitrary XML document and insert it into the data store without any modification and then retrieve that document without shredding, jamming or otherwise modifying it, he says. “Can it handle arbitrary variables in the XML documents, like lots of repeated tags and lots of levels of hierarchy?” Schmelzer asks. Another key feature is support for still-emerging standards such as XQuery.

Read more at: ComputerWorld

OASIS Forms Committee to Promote BPEL

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, a Cambridge, Mass., market research firm, said: “The submission of BPEL to OASIS is a great step for BPEL as well as Web Services in general. BPEL is a key specification aimed at providing a mechanism by which Web Services can be orchestrated into business processes, which can then be exchanged and choreographed with external processes. Business process is a critical aspect of adoption of Web Services and especially Service-Oriented Architectures since business processes are how companies define their business requirements that must then be implemented with Web Services. Without process, all you have is a jumble of Web Services. Specifications like BPEL bring order to the chaos by specifying a logical flow by which Web Services can be orchestrated to meet defined business requirements.”

Read more at: eWeek