CodeFutures News & Industry Commentary Blog

The BETA of FireStorm/DAO 3.2 is available for download.

FireStorm/DAO now installs correctly on Windows Vista.

There is one important release note: FireStorm/DAO user interface now requires JDK 1.5.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

Dana Gardner is the first industry analyst to comment on the announcement that SCA and SDO are being submitted to OASIS. The title of the article, "SCA/SDO goes to OASIS, could be to SOA what Java EE was to n-tier computing" pretty well summarizes Gardner's analysis of the important of SDO/SCA and the move to make them a formal industry standard.

Garner makes an important point about SCA/SDO that explains why they are not Java-only and part of the JCP.

SCA/SDO are designed to provide a common way to alleviate the complexity of adopting SOA across heterogeneity of services types and origins

Gardner also provides a rather sweeping conclusion:

This move shows an aggressive path for major vendors to making SOA the basis for modern computing, and for seeking a powerful standards and compliance force in the market to promote heterogeneity in the production, use, compositing, and extension of applications and data services. This may well form a turning point in the embrace and use of SOA as enterprises recognize the large investment the majority of large IT vendors are making, as well as the steps they are taking to foster open standards for extended levels of interoperability and common programmability of services.

So is this the J2EE moment for SOA Web Services? The answer is yes if important vendors at the top end of the market like IBM, SAP, Rogue Wave, and Oracle have their way.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

The OSOA has announced that the Service Component Architecture specifications to OASIS.

The C++ Service Data Object specification has also been submitted to OASIS, with the Java version going to JCP.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

Microsoft has joined the OpenAjax Alliance, which already has an impressive list of supporters including major industry vendors such as Google, IBM, Novell, Oracle, Yahoo, Red Hat and leading AJAX specialists like JackBe.

The significance of the announcement is that AJAX is now the very much established as the leading technology for rich, Web-based clients.

An interesting part of the discussion of Microsoft joining the OpenAjax Alliance is that Microsoft is claiming that they more or less invented AJAX!

Some might say it is only fitting that Microsoft should join the group that is helping to advance AJAX, as much of the technology in AJAX-style development originated at Microsoft, the company claims.

Indeed, Adam Bosworth, now a vice president at Google but formerly a key software architect at Microsoft, spoke at a Google event in January and described the process of creating AJAX at Microsoft 10 years ago.

"Back in '96-'97, me and a group of people, many of whom are here at Google, helped build stuff that these days is called AJAX," Bosworth said. "We sat down and took a hard look at what was going to happen with the Internet, and we concluded, in the face of unyielding opposition and animosity from virtually every senior person at Microsoft, that the thick client was on its way out and it was going to be replaced by browser-based apps.

"Saying this at Microsoft back in '96 was roughly equivalent to throwing matches around in an oil refinery," he said. "But we concluded we should go and build this thing. And we put all this stuff together so people could build thin-client applications."

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

There's a very interesting blog on the Intel site about The Multi-Core Dilemma by Patrick Leonard.

The Multi-Core Dilemma is:

a large percentage of mission-critical enterprise applications will not “automagically” run faster on multi-core servers. In fact, many will actually run slower.

The article explores the solutions to this problem.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

Khanderao has published an interesting blog entry on Service Data Objects.

Khanderao works for Oracle so it's good to see what someone inside that organization is thinking about Service Data Objects.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software.

InfoWorld editior Rick Grehan has written a very good review of seeMore Technologies' Virtual Database product. It is a shame he was too early to see the news that seeMore has added Service Data Object support. Grehan did a good job of reviewing the product would have interesting to see what he had to say about the SDO support.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

ZapThink has written an interesting article about BPM and SOA that focuses on the rather stricking disconnect between the activities of BPM and SOA experts. This is well worth considering in the context of the new Service Component Architecture and Service Data Object specifications, which are SOA speciifcations but would certainly benefit from input from BPM experts such as the BPM Group.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software