Eric Newcomer's Weblog

Dana Gardner posted a great entry about his meeting with some Ionaians last week (must have been Oisin and Debbie) last week at Eclipse World.

He hits the nail on the head about what we are doing, and about the potential for open source to meet SOA infrastructure requirements.

Search Web Services also did a nice preview and write up of Oisin's session on the SOA Tools Platform project.

If you think about Web services, as I do, as interfacing and interoperability technologies that are independent of execution environment, it's important to maintain separation of Web services descriptions and messages from any language or platform specific features. This separation is where they deliver most of their benefit, and from which they derive most of their power.

However there needs to be a mapping from this independent description and messaging (plus 'quality of service' services of course) to an execution environment. That's what SCA does. SCA is a component model, yes, and the reason we need it is because Web services are not executable (by definition they are independent of execution environment).

And of course on top of that we need tools.

And as I mentioned in the recent article in Enterprise Open Source Journal (sorry it is a large file) about enterprise open source, it makes sense to think about SOA infrastructure in terms of open source.

The software industry has been mainly proposing SOA infrastructure in terms of traditional commercial software paradigms. However, since SOA is basically an improvement layer on existing systems - a style of design or blueprint that encourages reusability and better integration - the kind of innovation we are starting to see in open source projects seems like a perfect fit.