Will Recession Provide a Boost to SOA?

There is no doubt that IT budgets will be cut next year. The size of the cut is hard to predict, but I think that it could exceed the Gartner’s forecast.

This, however, could finally give a shot in the arm to the long stagnated SOA projects. What makes me say that? Well, as I’ve been advocating all along, SOA represents an inexpensive way of adding flexibility and achieving new goals. SOA does not have to require significant new investments. Done smartly, it could be a great way of implementing new functionality without ripping the existing systems apart, which is undoubtedly won’t fly in light of highly constrained budgets.

To prove this point, in spite of lackluster economy, the demand for SOA architects has been booming.

There is one caveat to this view – organizations need to stop approaching SOA from the infrastructure standpoint (i.e., what ESB product do I need?) and start using it as a solution to real business needs. I’m not entirely sure that it’s going to happen, but bad economy could be just the motivation for that.

Updated Jython Ant Task

I've updated Ant Jython task with a number of new features:

• Jython path is now handled by a separate JythonPath task.

• Jython interpreter is now scoped to Ant project. This means that you can have multiple Jython calls withing the same project that share common imports and variables.

• Jython task now supports nested text, similar to the "script" task.