Gartner: SOA will drive next round of acquisitions by Oracle, SAP | Service-Oriented Architecture | ZDNet.com

Okay, this was a useful forecast by Gartner after the fact. Can we all say duh? As most have been purchased already, the question remains who is left?

webMethods Blogs

webMethods has started blogging. Check it out, they have some pretty smart people over there doing some cool stuff.

soapUI - soapui - tool integrations - ws-i tools

A cool little tool for WSDL compliance testing and test case generation I just started using. It even does load tests which is pretty slick. It's basically a graphical front end (Java based) to the variety of command line tools that are out there. Easy to use and setup.

AT&T buys poster child of ASP boom years | Software as services | ZDNet.com

It's good to see my old company from the .com era mentioned again, Interpath not USinternetworking. We actually built some pretty neat stuff at Interpath in the early days contrary to Phil's comments about services versus hosted applications.

Ah, those were the days. Unlimited budgets, brand new software models, lots of shiny new hardware. And our data center was the bomb baby. We worked like crazy but it was fun.

IBM prepares open-source systems management initiative for Eclipse - Yahoo! News

More on the SOA front. This one on Systems Management with relation to SOA and Open-Source. IBM is leading this effort.

The SOA "Trough of Disillusionment"

This is more discussion on the real world trys at SOA. Those that come from the EAI world know how this works. Many of the EAI projects failed for a lot of the same reasons.

I do think it is important to define what the "business" is. IT is itself a business and SOA has value there. Yes even in a corporate IT shop. There are numerous "business systems" within a corporate IT shop that can benefit from this type of architecture. A lot of these systems are not customer business systems but yet still have an impact on the overall cost and agility of the overall business.

It is an underestimation of the value of SOA to not include the "business of IT".

Pouring cold water on SOA 'reuse' mantra | Service-Oriented Architecture | ZDNet.com

An interesting article on reuse in the SOA world. I would add to the article by saying if you are successful with reuse of services another host of problems can crop up. Once a live running interface is in use by lots of folk, maintenance, upgrades, patching, outages, enhancements etc can become a real issue.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do it but you better have a good plan on how you are going to handle it.

Web Services Software Factory

Microsoft has just released a Web Services Software Factory. From what I have been able to digest so far it's not to bad especially from a getting started standpoint. I'm actually working on something similar for our webMethods Fabric layer. It follows a similar architecture but with a lot more messaging injected into it. It's a bit of a hybrid approach to EDA and SOA styles of architecture with messaging and web services as a foundation.

Obviously the Microsoft provided architecture could apply and be implemented with any other platforms that support web services. Microsoft does provide actual examples of the implementations with the download they provide. That means you are going to have to have VS 2005 in order to run the stuff. Yes I can hear the collective sigh.

Size Matters

At least according to astronomers ..... Pluto a planet no more.

Slashdot | DoD Study Urges OSS Adoption

A very good study/report on OSS that was presented to the DoD. Be sure to follow the links to get to the pdf. It's 79 pages long but a very good read. Vendor lock-in is a key theme.