Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Follow-up to SOA Master Class

I've gone through their hands on lab of the X-Registry. First impressions, very extensive and very easy to use. It had a flawless install and no issues running through the on-line labs. It is worth checking out.

While I was on their site, this popped up -

CISCO Buys Reactivity for $135M
SOA Master Class - Wednesday, 21 February 2007



Consolidation continues in the SOA market space.

webMethods Launches Free Trial Download of Industry-Leading SOA Governance Solution @ SOA WORLD MAGAZINE

A very nice move by webMethods. I highly recommend going over to http://www.soamasterclass.com and checking this out. You are not going to get very many opportunities like this with SOA governance products.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

UDDI Part 2

In my previous post I talked about working with MS's UDDI server. The Burton report that was released goes into a lot of detail about the big players in the Web Services management space like Systinet (Now owned by HP) and Infravio (Now owned by webMethods). The report really trashes MS's UDDI offering. I can certainly understand that, there is not much to it other than it's free with Windows Server 2003.

The bigger story however is the cost of the products mentioned above. They are expensive and thats all I going to say about that. So I'm curious now. How many folks are going out and buying these types of products versus building their own home grown solutions?

Windows Can Run Unmodified on SUSE in a Xen Environment @ SOA WORLD MAGAZINE

Virtualization continues to heat up. Speaking of heating up, the last part of the article is on Servers & Global Warming. I wonder how long it will take Sun to latch on to this report.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

UDDI set to emerge from the shadows of obscurity | Service-Oriented Architecture | ZDNet.com

Finally some talk about UDDI. This has been a very quiet topic for a while. I wonder if folks have been so busy selling their org's on Web Services that they are now turning their attention to managing them. At any rate there are not a lot of stand alone UDDI providers out there. Most come as part of a larger Web Services management suite.

I have been working with the UDDI provider built-in to Windows Server 2003. It is pretty basic and of course Microsoft changed the nomenclature of the standard UDDI pieces. But in the end it does work and I have even managed to get the UDDI client built-in to the webMethods Integration Server to talk to it.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Linux Desktop

I've tried out several flavors of Linux for use as a desktop system. I have to say Ubuntu wins for me. It's just way to easy and very fast. The cool thing is using it with Parallels. You can try Ubuntu out using their LiveCD option which means you don't even have to install it. I've used Fedora 5 & 6 as well as SuSe 9 and 10.2 as well. They are good distributions as well. It's hard to beat the Ubuntu though.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Enterprise Java Community: Mule: A Case Study

A very good article/case study on the use of Mule. Having used it a little, I can say that the ease of use is there for most things. Serious transformation does get more tedious however when compared to your normal EAI platforms like webMethods.

Overall a good product and a way to get your feet wet without spending a lot of money.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

SOA Mistakes

This is a follow-up to my previous post on JBOWS. It seems some others are touting the role of the ESB as well. Learning from SOA Mistakes and Avoid SOA Pitfalls both go into some detail about the role of the ESB. The main point both make is it helps you avoid JBOWS and the same old brittle architecture of the past.

The bottom line is this, implementing a bunch of Web Services without something in the middle is going to leave you with a standards oriented mess. Let's call that SOM. Pronounce it like some, as in that is SOM fine architecture you can up with.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Web Services Specs.

A good article that is not vendor bias. The second page has some very good resources for compliance testing and user group resources.