Middleware Matters

As techies, we like to discuss and argue about the technical issues and details behind SOA and services. Unfortunately, we often forget that in the big picture, those technical issues can be nearly inconsequential. In my latest IEEE Internet Computing (IC) column, entitled "The Social Side of Services," I discuss the human side of SOA. I bring up some of the issues you'll run into in trying to get your organization to adopt service-oriented approaches, and offer some suggestions on getting SOA buy-in. Unless you can achieve such buy-in, the technical issues, while incredibly interesting, won't matter much for you.

As always, comments on this column, or any of my previous columns, are welcomed. Notably, this is my 24th column for IC, and at 6 per year, I must say the past four years have flown past. I'll soon begin work on my 25th column, and I welcome any input you might have on topics you'd like me to cover this year.

(In addition to the link to my column on DSOnline above, a PDF for the column will be available from my home page within the next few days.)

Celtix milestone 4 is now available for download. If you've never heard of Celtix, it's an open source Java ESB, as explained on its home page:

Celtix delivers a Java enterprise service bus (ESB) runtime and set of APIs that make it easy to add transports, message formats, and security features. The goal is to simplify the construction, integration and flexible reuse of technical and business components using a standards-based, service-oriented architecture.

Congratulations on this deliverable to the Celtix team, who have a great record for hitting their project milestones. Simply put, these folks are kicking butt. A few of them sit near me here at IONA, and naturally I talk to them quite a bit. I think they're making all the right decisions in terms of feature set, design and implementation approaches, and flexibility points. Download it and try it for yourself.

Hopefully the next milestone will even contain some contributions from yours truly. I'll talk more about those capabilities here over the next few weeks.