Thursday, October 13, 2005
There is an article Tackling a Java Challenge With SOA on Service Data Objects on InternetNews. It's interesting that Clint Boulton is one of the few industry commentators covering the Service Data Objects, which has got almost no media or analyst attention to date. Also, not many vendors have implemented the specification.
CodeFutures is actively looking at Service Data Objects. It's difficult to understand the general lack of industry interest.
Is anyone out there using Service Data Objects?
Friday, October 07, 2005
The CBDI Forum has just published some comments on the confusing statistics that are published on the usage of Web Services technology and Service Oriented Architectures.
It seems to depend on how you ask the question, but it seems that one survey showed that 87% of organizations were using Web Services. The CBDI rightly discounts the probability of this being really true and then goes on to discuss the fact that rolling out a true Service Oriented Architectures involves a lot more than just using some parts of the Web Services technology stack.
The customer survey that CodeFutures conducted in September had hundreds of responses. The reply to the question "Are you currently using/planning to use Web Services/SOA technology in production?" got a 77% positive response rate.
So what does this mean?
For a start, it's clear that Web Services are now mainstream and in widespread use at some level (even if, as CBDI points out, just at the technology-only level without any true business services). This is good news. I was working in Cape Clear software when it brought out the first commercial SOAP stack. There was a huge amount of interest, but not a lot of use in real projects.
The big question is: If it's taken 5 years for the underlying Web Services technology to reach critical mass, how long will it take before true Service Oriented Architectures are mainstream?
The answer is not until some technical challenges, most importantly scalability, and some organizational problems such as service management, are solved. Repackinging SOAP stacks as Enterprise Service Buses and adding SOAP support to monolithic J2EE application servers will not be enough.
CodeFutures is actively looking at Service Data Objects as the future of Java persistence in Service-Oriented Architectures.
PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software