Meeting Herbjörn

Herbjörn and I met up in Sala yesterday. What great fun exploring the cafes of town and eating some very authentic Swedish food called pytt-i-pannan and discussing ideas for our article and book authoring activities.

Herbjörn also recommended two books which I shall read soon:

• Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans
• Enterprise SOA Adoption Strategies by Steve Jones (CTO of Cap Gemini) -- this book is available online after registration on innoq.
  

New Gartner Magic Quadrants

Gartner has just published new magic quadrants for the SOA/integration application infrastructure. They divide them into three different markets - although some products by the big-name vendors fall into multiple categories:

• New Systematic SOA Application Projects - this market represents the grand, all-encompassing SOA suites, which - in a way - contradict the "best-of-breed" appraoch that most SOA advocates propagate. These products are positioned as overarching, complete SOA stacks. Integration is less of a requirement in this category than modeling and design, service implementation (from scratch), UI and orchestration/BPM.Gartner sees IBM WPS and Portal, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Microsoft .net/Azure as leaders -- with the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform a close call. SAP NetWeaver is considered too ABAP/SAP specific to serve as the basis for a corporate-wide SOA initiative.All the plus points that Oracle can gather (except for BPM) seem to come from the BEA acquisition.
  
  
• SOA Composite Application Projects - this market covers tools that can deal with a Brownfield situation, where most business logic is preexistent and independently deployed. Gartner defines a composite application as "a software assembly that implements a set of independent but related functions — each meant to be perceived by users as indivisible — and where the component parts are heterogeneous in their information architecture." Integration can occur either at the user-facing logic ("integration at the glass": mashup, (personal) portal and screen scraping, Web scraping) or in the backend (invoking services or the business logic of the backend app directly using a variety of communication protocols, while guaranteeing reliability, scalability, manageability and security). "A composite-application-oriented platform that is narrower in functionality, but also more deeply integrated and less-expensive than general-purpose suites". IBM, Oracle, Tibco, SAP, Software AG (webMethods) and Microsoft are in the leader's quadrant, whereas Red Hat is still considered a niche player here.
  
  
• Back-End Application Integration Projects - this market came about as the cross-fertilization between EAI, MOM and WS-platform/management products. Its most prominent product representative are ESB platforms. Gartner sees the following drivers in this market: "1) companies expanding their SOA initiatives, 2) the trend of creating services by using existing business logic and data assets and 3) an emerging recognition that there is a huge overlap in the features required to support the deployment of SOA-based applications and those required to support data consistency, multistep process and composite application integration styles". Minimum criteria for membership in this category are: integration services, SOA and BPM support, management, dev environment, B2B, CEP, BAM, data integration. MS, IBM, Oracle, Tibco, Sun and Software AG are in the leader's quadrant again; Progress, Red Hat and surprinsingly -- good old Fiorano -- are kicking around as visionaries.
  
  

The Power of Network Intelligence

Forbes CIO Magazine ran an interesting article recently titled "Networks aren't just Data Highways" - lamenting the tremendous untapped compute power of the Internet's underlying infrastructure of routers, switches, firewalls, LBs, etc. Since all enterprise relevant information (email, CRM and ERP entries, etc) flows through the network, this is the one place where all data meet

Dan Woods predicts a development of the network towards an integral part of the application with the following tasks:

• value added functionality (auditing, monitoring)
  
• policy compliance monitoring (products by SAP, Cisco)
• prevention of information leaks, intrusion detection
  
• event mining for business intelligence purpose
• devices with intelligence can act as event sources (GPS, RFID, WLAN hubs, user presence, smartcard readers, cameras, etc.)

two new (free) SOA books

Two new SOA books have just come out recently. Both are available as free PDFs (after registration):

• An Implementor’s Guide to Service Oriented Architecture: Seven vendor representatives offer their views on the constituting parts of SOA and best practices. The aspects they examine are service design, registries and repositories, ESBs, runtime management, organizational structures and capability development (team, training). I especially enjoyed the ESB section by Hub Vandervoort of Progress. Hub details different mediation requirements that enterprises have today. He then goes on to demonstrate how these can be addressed with different infrastructure choices, such as ESB.
  
  
• SOA Adoption for Dummies (courtesy of Software AG): The author liken SOA adoption to a space journey: keep the pointy end of the rocket up until you reach weightlessness. I quite like the view on ESB presented in this book - ESB is only one of a kind of SOA intermediation infrastructure - and it doesn't sit in between consumers and providers tying everything together. Rather it exposes services of different size, smell and colour in a homogeneous fashion to the consumer layer.
  

  
  Some SOA nerds may squirm after reading the ESB sections in this chapter. If you’re one of them, you may be inclined to have a near-religious belief in the classical view of ESB. In the classical view, an ESB is a critical piece of SOA infrastructure that sits between service providers and consumers. The services themselves are not hosted on the bus. We also strongly believe in the need for such infrastructure and address it in the later section “Understanding Service Mediation,” but we don’t believe that only products with an ESB label have a special right to be that piece of infrastructure.

I also like the following statement on the need for an intermediation layer in an SOA in order to increase flexibility and loose coupling:

In order to achieve maximum flexibility in your SOA, service consumers should never connect directly to the service implementations in the service-enablement layer. Instead, they should connect to the service interface hosted in a separate service-mediation layer.

Microsoft ESB Guidance v 2.0 out

Congratulations to Dmitri Ossipov and his team. They've just released version 2.0 of the Microsoft ESB Guidance.

• MSDN site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/esb
• Community Extensions: http://codeplex.com/esb

From Adlai Maschiachs MS blog:

The Microsoft ESB Guidance provides architectural guidance, patterns, practices, and a set of BizTalk Server and .NET components to simplify the development of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on the Microsoft platform and to allow Microsoft customers to extend their own messaging and integration solutions. The Microsoft ESB Guidance consists of a series of interoperating components that support and implement a loosely coupled messaging environment that makes it easier to build message-based enterprise applications. The services and components fall naturally into the following seven categories:

• Web services. These expose internal services such as itinerary processing, exception management, resolution of endpoints and maps, BizTalk operations, UDDI interoperation, and transformation of message content.
  
• Itinerary services and centralized store. These include agents for performing transformations and message delivery. You can resolve itinerary from the store and create custom services that participate in Itinerary processing.
  
• Itinerary on-ramps. These receive external messages using either SOAP or WCF. On-ramps expose the itinerary SOAP header and perform itinerary processing, using the Microsoft ESB Guidance Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework for dynamic resolution of endpoints and metadata.
  
• On-ramps. These receive external messages in a range of formats and transports, such as HTTP, JMS, WMQ, FTP, Flat File, and XML. They are typical BizTalk receive locations that optionally use the Microsoft ESB Guidance pipeline components and the Microsoft ESB Guidance Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework for dynamic resolution of endpoints and metadata.
  
• Off-ramps. These implement send ports for the delivery of messages using formats and transports such as SOAP, WCF, JMS, WMQ, FTP, HTTP, Flat File, XML, or any other custom formats. They are typical BizTalk send ports that optionally use the Microsoft ESB Guidance pipeline components and the Microsoft ESB Guidance Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework for dynamic resolution of endpoints and metadata.
  
• Exception Management Framework. This includes the exception Web service, the exception management API, and components that enrich, process, and pass exception details to the ESB Management Portal.
  
• ESB Management Portal. This provides registry provisioning, exception mediation, alert notification, and analytics.

SOA Symposium 2008

Early next month I'll at the SOA Symposium 2008 in Amsterdam, presenting two talks on the topic of ESB. My friend Jim calls them "enterprise manboobs" in his hilarious talk.