Slashdot Mirror

Google is the largest datamining company in the world.

I thought that was Wal*Mart or Tesco?

According to TFA it's the number of free software packages that's "up 26%", not business use of free software.

Bad submitter, bad!!!.
Bad editors, bad! Bad!

Not only is the summary is extremely misleading, it links to an equally misleading blog post with no direct link to TFA, which I found here

This is the longest rant I think I've ever seen that was composed based on zero knowledge of the technical subject at hand, but rather on some kind of on-the-fly interpretation of the three words "service" "oriented" and "architecture" used in juxtaposition.

Your points:

1. [...]being "service oriented" is roughly as new as dirt.

   See above.

2. how in the world this would relate to software reuse

   SOA makes software reuse not only easy but unavoidable - through tooling. See my other posts here for other thoughts in this vein, including use of ESB (Enterprise Service Bus).

3. ...they haven't really told you anything about how to facilitate reuse in general, or how SOA is supposed to contribute to that...

   Interesting. What else have you tried to read besides this sales-oriented (I call it marketecture ) web page? Any actual technical articles?

Jabber is normally thought of as yet another IM system, but "Jabber is an open XML protocol for the real-time exchange of messages and presence between any two points on the Internet" (from the Jabber site). Its first application has been IM, but it is by no means limited to IM. Jabber is a protocol specification, and there are several open and closed source implementations of clients and servers.

xmlBlaster is a more traditional MOM offering, under LGPL. It supports numerous protocols and bindings into a number of languages.

As usual, Google offers a lot of advice on the topic of 'mom middleware "open source"', including a list of MOM implementations which tells us that JORAM is also open source, and an article entitle Open Source in Middleware.

As it stands now Web services are just the next step in the evolution to a platform-neutral, language-neutral distributed software environment. I see alot of M$ bashing going on, which is somewhat misplaced since some of the biggest backers of web services also happen to be M$'s biggest foes (read - IBM). M$ is however, trying to pull off one of their famous hijacks, with .NET. If they succeed it will be at least partly because of their competitors failure to take the initiative.

Getting back to web services though, they can possibly fill a niche in enterprise computing - and that niche is the ever-present, never fully solved question of how to tie together disparate platforms and software applications in a common enterprise environment. CORBA is the oft-quoted answer, but it is expensive to implement, and hard to get right. Wells Fargo has implemented an interesting solution for distributed programming using something they call Model Driven Architecture.

Looking at getting systems working together from an IT managers perspective, your always looking at the Big Two - time and money. 'How can I get this system working with my current resources in the least amount of time?'. The complement to that is 'How do we maintain and augment this solution once it goes into production without going through birthing pains?'.

The promise that Web Services is making to IT managers is that they will be able to lower their TCO and increase their ROI by cutting down on the number of changes they have to make to existing systems, while at the same time increasing their flexibility in adding new functionality. To others it makes the promise of providing services that can be metered and billed (wasnt that the promise of CORBA, EJB's, insert favorite distributed model here?).

Of course this is all a pipe dream until they solve some big issues, like security. Transaction management is not as important since web services can actually be implemented in any kind of language you want (read - Implement your own damn transactions).

However I think most IT managers will go blue in the face the first time their Fund Transfer web service is hacked because of a weak 56 bit SSL connection ;)