Eric Newcomer's Weblog

Update 1/3: (and apologies for the delay) the archive for this and other Webcasts on open source and AMQP have been posted.

Yesterday Anne and I finally had a chance to catch up and prepare for Tuesday's Webcast.

We're trying a new format - more of an interactive style than a straight presentation. Anne is going to introduce the topic of SOA infrastructure and interview me about it, focusing on how the distributed approach is different from the centralized approach typical of most ESBs.

I like Anne's view of SOA -- she draws a clear contrast with application integration. Althought services can be used to integrate applications, that is not their main purpose (reuse is), and software which was designed for application integration (e.g. EAI brokers) is not likely to work well for reusable services.

While it's true enough that SOA is an approach, not a technology, some technologies are better suited to SOA than others. In particular the distributed approach has many advantages - such as incremental adoption (with reasonable starting price), easier to achieve reuse (which is, after all, the main point of SOA), and greater deployment flexibility.

The distributed approach also creates some challenges around management and governance, and believe me Anne will not be shy about asking the tough questions here...

Hope to see you Tuesday! (Or if you happen to be reading this after Dec. 12, check for the archive link.)

As always, please let us know what you think. Join the Webcast and ask a question, send email, post a comment, etc.