Monthly Archives: June 2007

XML Appliances Begin Supporting Java

Posted on: June 21, 2007 | Posted in: SOA, XML Appliances

Layer7 announced that its appliances will support Java-based custom assertions. Details are sketchy at this point but apparently Layer7 will provide a proprietary SDK for developing assertions. This could be much more powerful mechanism than XSLT-only facilities in IBM DataPower.

So how long before appliances begin supporting JBI and SCA components? The trick here of course is to make sure that an appliance is still a robust low-maintenance device that can’t be brought down by a rogue application thread. But if Layer7 was able to figure it out for Java in general (I wonder if they use a general Sun JDK or some kind of a special JDK build), there is no reason why an appliance can’t start supporting more advanced specifications such as JBI/SCA.

Comparison of SOA Suites

Posted on: June 17, 2007 | Posted in: BPEL, ESB, SOA, Web services

Several SOA vendors are trying to put together comprehensive suites of SOA products that in theory should be capable of
addressing
all aspects of SOA, including governance, integration, business process management and others.

Formation of SOA suites is having a tremendous impacts on how SOA products are selected
as many organizations
are being tempted to settle for “one stop shop” approach as opposed to doing proper product evaluation
within each SOA product category. (Interesting discussion about SOA suites is available at
ZDNet).

So what is a SOA suite and how offerings from different vendors support different aspects of SOA?
The table below attempts to answer this question.

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SCA and JBI Mean Nothing for SOA?

Posted on: June 6, 2007 | Posted in: SCA, SOA

There is an interesting and somewhat controversial interview with ZapThink’s Jason Bloomberg where he claims that SCA and JBI are just going to “muddy the waters” as opposed to provide real help to SOA architects.

I certainly agree with his assessment that SCA (can’t really speak about JBI) is more of a generic component-centric programming model than a SOA implementation framework. I blogged about it before. However, I do think that SCA is going to provide a lot of value in the area of application architecture and just general component reuse. A technology or a framework does not have to be about SOA to be useful.

Will JAX-WS Become the Primary Mechanism for Invoking RESTful Services?

Posted on: June 2, 2007 | Posted in: JAX-WS, Web services

Developers working with REST and XML/HTTP services have traditionally used light-weight APIs, such as java.net classes or Apache HttpClient. Web services APIs provided by JAX-RPC were SOAP and “enterprise” only and they required J2EE libraries. The situation changed with the release of JAX-WS and its inclusion into Java SE 6. JAX-WS supports RESTful services; also, its Dispatch interface allows clients to work with XML directly as opposed to having to use object mapping or completely unwieldy SAAJ API. A nice example of using JAX-WS to implement a client for a RESTful service is available in Mark Hadley’s blog.

However, I don’t think that JAX-WS is going to become the primary way of implementing RESTful clients just yet. In many situations, HttpClient provides more flexibility and control over HTTP calls.

For example, it is very straightforward to turn on basic authentication for a client using HttpClient APIs:

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