Jean-Christophe Martin's blog - Soa category

IBM acquires Webify

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 23:32:00 GMT

Today, IBM announced that they are acquiring Webify:

ARMONK, NY - 02 Aug 2006: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it acquired Webify Solutions, an Austin, Texas-based, privately held provider of industry-specific software and services for building service oriented architectures (SOA).

Webify provides what they call Industry Fabrics :

The Webify Industry Fabric is an integrated environment for policy driven sourcing, assembly, delivery and governance of business services and composite business services. It consists of six complementary modules that allows companies to source, provision, deliver, and govern industry-specific business services, processes, content, and events from a variety of internal and external sources.

They have fabrics for the following industries:

Healthcare
Banking
Telecom
Insurance

Technorati Tags: soa

SOA 2.0 and why it doesn't really fly

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 16:37:00 GMT

You might have read about the tentative to create a new version of the Service Oriented Architecture dubbed SOA 2.0.
You might also have seen the rise of opposition to this new term on some blogs like Elemental Links or even an online petition to oppose this term.

The main rational for creating a new version of SOA seems to be :

With SOA 2.0, an event-driven architecture is deployed in which software modules are related to business components, and alerts and event notifications are featured. The initial SOA concept has not been event-driven but instead has featured direct calls from one piece of software to another in a client-server process, Natis said.

Well, that doesn't fly. What events are we talking about here ? In which way these events are different from asynchronous service invocations ? What about messages sent on an ESB like Mule or openESB ? Are they events ?

I would point to this article for a good example on how EDA and SOA can come together, without releasing a new architecture version.

HelloWorld service engine from Petals deployed on openESB

Thu, 25 May 2006 22:07:36 GMT

The next step after playing with the openESB platform in a previous blog entry, more as a user, and look at what it takes to develop a service engine. I found on the web a tutorial on writing a service engine for ObjectWeb's Petals. They give a pre-packaged Hello World service engine. I tried to install it on top of the openESB starter kit. It's quite simple :

in the Runtime panel, expand the Sun Java System Application Server node, then the JBI node.
right click on the Service Engines node, select Install "New Service Engine"
point to the .zip file, and you are done.

Here is the result :

Next step is to understand how to activate the Service Engine, and extend it.