Autonomic SOA Web Services - Achieving Fully "Business-Conscious" IT Systems

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) and autonomic computing are among the hottest topics in IT today. SOA simplifies integration and facilitates the componentization of enterprise-wide systems, thereby enabling optimal business agility. Autonomic computing allows these systems to operate without human intervention - through self-configuring, self-healing, and self-managing capabilities. By combining autonomic computing with SOA, enterprises can now achieve a new IT utopia, named 'Autonomic SOA.' However, this new level of autonomic computing goes beyond just reacting to traditional IT issues, such as increasing the speed to diagnose, repair, and prevent future issues. Autonomic SOA is also able to respond dynamically as changes occur within business conditions and processes, thereby empowering enterprises everywhere to achieve flawless execution on a daily basis.

[Latest Articles From SOA WEB SERVICES JOURNAL]

Virtualization ramp up is real - IDC

Enterprise technology managers are moving toward virtual servers and vendors are following the trend, IDC says in a new report.

[InfoWorld TechWatch]

Ask an Analyst -- will MPLS matter for Grid environments?

To what extent will the public Internet be adequate to handle the burdens of Grid traffic? I recently took that question to Johna Till Johnson, President of Nemertes Research, and she was quick to point out that Grid / Networking discussions are likely to raise questions about the role of MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) in carrying Grid traffic. Here's what she had to say...

[Grid Meter]

Groove P2P System Assists Hurricane Relief

Case study: Florida enlists Groove Networks in a bid to better manage disaster response.

[eWEEK Technology News]

Authorization processing for Globus Toolkit Java Web services

Examine authorization options and architecture in Globus Toolkit 4.0 (GT4), and learn how to develop your own custom authorization module. The authors walk through the GT4 authorization architecture and module interfaces, and explain ways you can implement different authorization algorithms and scenarios.

[developerWorks : Grid computing : Technical library]

IGA grid helps developers grid-enable applications

Application developers at IBM needed a way to build grid-enabled applications without having to be hooked up to a grid system. The solution was to build a grid framework called the IBM Global Account (IGA) grid architecture. The authors describe the architecture and components of their grid framework and its deployment model.

[developerWorks : Grid computing : Technical library]

IBM Brings Virtualization To The Desktop With Blade Bundle

The system pairs an IBM xSeries or BladeCenter server with versions of VMWare's virtual infrastructure software and Citrix's Presentation Server.

[All InformationWeek Stories]

Greene trumpets a virtual future

VMware's leader discusses the hows and whys of the industry's move toward virtualization.

[CNET News.com]

VMware Player Runs Virtual Machines For Free

Free utility enables companies to distribute beta software, custom applications, or special environments to workers or customers who don't use VMware's more expensive products.

[All InformationWeek Stories]

XenSource Poised To Reshape The Virtualization Market

With its first commercial open-source solutions expected to launch within weeks, XenSource is poised to challenge VMware and commoditize the virtualization software market, observers predict.

[All InformationWeek Stories]

BMC Intros Virtualization Suite

The additions to BMC's service-oriented resource management system are designed to help better allocate resources to virtualized servers and data-center and systems-management processes.

[All InformationWeek Stories]

Banks Moving to Implement Service-Oriented Architecture

Worldwide expansion, process efficiency, greater customer sophistication, emergence of new competition, and increased regulatory demands are forcing banks to improve systems, a survey shows.

[All InformationWeek Stories]

WS-BPEL 2.0 Extensions for Sub-Processes

Designing complex and large business processes requires a language that supports modularization and re-use, in a portable, interoperable way. This paper outlines an extension to WS-BPEL that allows for the definition of sub-processes that can be reused within the same or across multiple WS-BPEL processes. The paper describes different invocation scenarios and introduces an appropriate coordination protocol used for interoperable invocation of sub-processes across infrastructures from different vendors.

[developerWorks : SOA and Web services : Technical library]

Maximize your grid potential, Part 3: Security and authentication

This tutorial is the last of a three-part series designed to help you make better use of the grid resources available to you. It focuses on security and shows how to simplify the operational aspects of and extend the capabilities of the core grid authentication middleware. Learn how security tools, such as GSI-enabled SSH and MyProxy online credential repository, enable simpler grid credential management and how one can realize convenient, secure, seamless, and pervasive access to widely distributed grid resources.

[developerWorks : Grid computing : Technical library]

So What Questions Would I Ask on a SOA Certification Test?

I was thinking, if we created an exam to certify architects in the basics of SOA, what would those questions be? Here are some I came up with:

[Real World SOA]

OASIS Looks to Standardize Web Services

The organization has announced an initiative to define specifications that will help software customers better utilize Web services to create composite applications.

[eWEEK Technology News]

JBoss bulks up with rules engine, ESB

Positioning its middleware as an open source SOA platform, JBoss is adding the Drools Java business rules engine to its stable of products.

[InfoWorld: Web services]

Virtualization roils traditional licensing models

VMware and Microsoft are separately attempting to wipe out two layers of uncertainty clouding server virtualization.

[InfoWorld: Platforms]

Persistence within a SOA...What You Need to Consider

I've been thinking about where databases exist in the context of a SOA. Truth-be-told traditional approaches to integration are really about keeping persistence at the points, within the source or target systems. However, with the use of services there is a clear advantage in keeping some persistence at a central-tier. Let me see if I can explain myself.

[Real World SOA]

Andreessen: Innovation Is Humming

 Where do you see the most exciting pockets of innovation?

All over the map: On the one hand, in terms of stuff you can see, [it's] in the Web. And with the build-out of broadband and mobile, there's the build-out of new, huge Web startups. [There are] huge rates of change, and businesses are continuing to build out Web applications. You go into any company, and the number of new Web sites is just staggering.

Similar stuff is happening in the home with new technology, from music to video. There's actually a big story on the economics to build out information systems. It's falling in price so fast, the cost is becoming almost trivial. Then that's leading to explosion of new applications. Servers are completely commoditized. It's shocking the velocity with which networking and storage infrastructure software has commoditized.

We've entered a phase where a lot [that was] invented in the 1990s is being deployed at a massive scale. That stuff is all accelerated and we're at the beginning of a 10-year wave of deployment.

 

[Networking & Infrastructure News]

Web services standards need to mature before SOA can really take off

Web services standards need to mature before SOA can really take off.

[Latest standards news from Network World.com]

The Principles of Service-Orientation

With the unwavering prominence of service-oriented architecture (SOA) there is an increasing interest in understanding what exactly it means for something to be considered 'service-oriented.' Thomas Erl recently completed a lengthy research project for SOA Systems Inc. into the origins of SOA and the current state of service-orientation among all primary SOA technology platforms. This body of work contributed to the mainstream SOA methodology developed by SOA Systems and was also documented in Thomas's new book, Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design. We caught up with Thomas (a previous contributor to WSJ) to ask him to share some of the insights he gained from his work with SOA and service-orientation.

[Latest Articles From SOA WEB SERVICES JOURNAL]

Effective description, discovery, and integration

The Rodney Dangerfield of Web services standards is clearly Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration. UDDI don't get no respect. Its original conception -- a global e-marketplace for services -- looks, for now, like a dot-com-era fantasy.

[InfoWorld: Web services]

GridWorld Encourages Enterprise Adoption

Reporter's Notebook: "Join the club," grid advocates say, as they offer newcomers to the technology hardware, software and advice.

[eWEEK Technology News]

Advertise Web services with Atom 1.0

Advertise Web services using the new Atom 1.0 Syndication Format combined with the Web Services Addressing specification.

[developerWorks : SOA and Web services : Technical library]

SOA Testing Framework

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become today's technology buzz and it's rapidly becoming a mainstream approach to enterprise systems design. Beyond the buzz of SOA, organizations face several challenges as they attempt to truly effectuate the paradigm shift towards SOA. One critical challenge is: How can we assure the quality of the business services that we build? Can the services we build withstand the test of rapid organizational change? One way to address this challenge is through the use of effective testing methodologies and tools for the services deployed under an organization's SOA fabric.

[Latest Articles From SOA WEB SERVICES JOURNAL]

SOA Management: Exclusive Q & A With Michael Liebow, VP of IBM Web Services

'Today,' says Michael Liebow, VP of IBM Web Services, 'most often our customers are finding that an increasing number of business pain points can be resolved in an SOA and within that service oriented architecture they require the ability to manage and govern the technology.' Here Liebow tells about the IBM Global Services SOA Management Practice.

[Latest Articles From SOA WEB SERVICES JOURNAL]

Grids for the enterprise: an introduction to service-oriented grids

Title: Grids for the enterprise: an introduction to service-oriented grids

Date:  October 20, 2005

Time: 9:00 a.m. Pacific time; noon Eastern time

For more info or to register:  http://www.presentationselect.com/hpinvent/detailsl.asp#990

Grid computing is a powerful way to virtualize resources and create a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in which the IT infrastructure is linked dynamically so that changing business needs can be met in real time. This webcast discusses the problems solved by grid, provides example use cases, and relates grid to Web services and SOA. This discussion of grid architectural components, standards, and management frameworks provides important information about how grid maps into HP's vision of the Adaptive Enterprise.

Increase flexibility with the Service Integration Maturity Model (SIMM)

Increase flexibility in your Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) when you apply the seven levels of maturity on the path to SOA adoption. Authors Ali Arsanjani and Kerrie Holley take you on a tour of the Service Integration Maturity Model (SIMM).

[developerWorks : SOA and Web services : Technical library]

Microsoft virtualization roadmap disclosed details

I just attended the live webcast Microsoft Virtualization Roadmap arranged to detail what to expect for the near future about virtualization.

The webcast recording is available here: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=4018895

[virtualization.info]

Say goodbye to complexity when developing Web services

Get an introduction to the Ad Hoc Development and Integration tool for End Users (ADIEU), a tool for developing Web applications and Web services without having to know anything about Java programming.

[developerWorks : SOA and Web services : Technical library]

IBM has first Grid and Grow app partners

IBM announced the first application vendors -- SAS Institute and Absoft  -- to support its Grid and Grow bundle of software, hardware, and services Tuesday. Big Blue first unveiled the bundle two months ago positioning it as a starter pack for midsize and large companies wanting to move into grid computing. IBM is now looking to extend the offering in a variety of ways both in terms of targeted users and vendor support.

[InfoWorld: Networking]

IBM Grid Grows

IBM announced new grid-enabled software from SAS and Absoft, and two new customers.

[All InformationWeek Stories]

GridWorld: Users see grid computing as a cost saver

The appeal of grid computing to the scientific community, financial services companies, the pharmaceutical industry and other compute-intensive users is strong and growing, according to those on hand for GridWorld in Boston.

[Computerworld Grid Computing News]

Parallels enters virtualisation market

Offers better, cheaper alternative to VMWare, company claims.

[Techworld.com OS and Servers News]

Intelligent Reaction - new approach to the customer supplier relationship

 

Brian Benzinger of Solution Watch did a good review of 37signals Writeboard. I wrote about it earlier this evening after playing with it for a few minutes. I predicted that lots of other blogs would write about Writeboard, and I was right. Or is that write? Heheh. Memeorandum is already bulging with lots of reviews of Writeboard.

What continues to impress me about this company is their customer service, and turnaround. I've seen a few features added just tonight.

Adam Bosworth, of Google, recently did a presentation at Salesforce.com's conference where he talked about this new kind of development model, which he named "Intelligent Reaction."

These guys have it down. Kudos.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

SOA & Web Services: Will Sun "Destroy That Village In Order to Save It" (From Microsoft)?

'Web services and SOA aren't boring,' mused Sun's Tim Bray 6 months ago in an essay about Sun's strategy that everyone seems to have forgotten. 'But we may have to destroy that village in order to save it,' he continued. Has that process now begun? Do SOA and Web services represent the grass that is about to be trampled as two familiar i-Technology elephants – Sun and Microsoft – fight?

[Latest Articles From SOA WEB SERVICES JOURNAL]

Cisco Promotes Network-Centric Utility Computing

Cisco introduces an InfiniBand-based server fabric switch portfolio that, when combined with its VFrame 3.0 data-center-virtualization software, will bring a new approach to utility computing.

[All InformationWeek Stories]

More Evidence that We're Moving to a Web Services Marketplace for Enterprise Applications

In reading a recent blog by Phil Wainewright highlighting the shift from enterprise applications to a service marketplace, I'm thinking that the writing is on the wall as to the inevitable shift.

Clearly, we are building service marketplaces now, and eventually these electronic marketplaces will provide most of our enterprise application functionality, delivered as remote Web services directly into enterprise and composite applications...

[Real World SOA]

Virtualized-OS company makes 64-bit change

SWsoft has updated Virtuozzo to support 64-bit x86 processors, a useful feature for software that lets an administrator carve a server up into multiple partitions.

[CNET News.com]

Maximize your grid potential, Part 2: GridWay

This tutorial is Part 2 in a three-part series designed to help you make better use of the grid resources available to you. In Part 1, we discussed information providers such as Ganglia. Here, we'll look at the use of meta-schedulers, or brokers, which take that data and make it easier to select the most appropriate and efficient resource for your job.

[developerWorks : SOA and Web services : Technical library]

Virtualization sets software meter running

In this week's column, Rise of the Virtual PC, I mentioned how software streaming products from companies like Softricity Inc. are making where applications reside and where they execute irrelevant from the user's standpoint.  "The idea is to create an environment that is an illusion, that never fails," says IDC's Dan Kuznetsky.

But another cool aspect of the technology from a management standpoint is the ability to do very granular software metering. The tools can deploy an application and then remove it when you're done so it can be used by someone else. To the extent that licensing goes to a usage-based model, these tools can meter and enforce that.

[Computerworld Blogs - Operating Systems]

SOA Software, AmberPoint help manage SOAs

SOA Software and AmberPoint are bolstering SOA and Web-services management, with SOA Software focused on BEA Systems middleware and AmberPoint verifying SOA operations.

[InfoWorld: Web services]

Is the "Web" in "Web Services" a Misnomer?

I know I shall be accused of being old-fashioned, but sometimes in order to understand the present, let alone the future, one of the very best starting-places is the past. Take for example the present surrounding Web services. The best clue to what is happening right now comes from a philosopher, the English philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill.

[Latest Articles From SOA WEB SERVICES JOURNAL]

Grid surprise

Once considered a specialty technology, the latest buzz pegs grids as great all-around application servers.

As grid computing enters more enterprise environments, the buzz over the technology's potential never ceases. Once grids are installed, network executives find them useful for a far wider variety of applications than just computationally heavy ones. They also work well for applications that have high transactional volumes or are data intensive. And after sending those apps to the grid, it dawns on these early adopters that what they have is a giant, powerful - and comparatively inexpensive - next-generation generic application server....

http://www.networkworld.com/buzz/2005/092605-grid.html

Troubleshooting SOAs and Grids Not Going to be Easy

Another discussion that I believe will start to get more air-time is what it means to troubleshoot SOA / Grid environments.

[Grid Meter]

The Service-Oriented Business App

The term is new, but is a SOBA really different from an SOA?

Following on the heels of the service-oriented architecture, the service-oriented business application is generating the latest buzz in distributed computing. While distinguishing between SOA and SOBA isn't easy - since both terms are used to describe constructing application infrastructures from Web services - the idea is that SOBA can be deployed on top of SOA, or other infrastructure models. The term's creator positions SOBA as the ultimate incarnation of the client/server business application - ERP, CRM and others - that has become today's monolithic beast.

http://www.networkworld.com/buzz/2005/092605-soba.html 

Open source ESB, Java program model advance

Two companies are unveiling open source efforts in the categories of enterprise service bus (ESB) and Java models. SymphonySoft is updating the Mule ESB and JBoss is introducing its Seam model for building enterprise Java applications.

[InfoWorld: Web services]

Maximize your grid potential, Part 1: Ganglia

This tutorial is Part 1 in a three-part series designed to help you make better use of the grid resources available to you. We will look at the use of information services in a grid and discuss the monitoring use of the Ganglia tool kit to enhance the information services already present in the Globus environment. Later parts of this series will discuss how to maximize your grid potential in the areas of brokerage and security.

[developerWorks : Grid computing : Technical library]

Rise of the Virtual PC

Opinion: Robert L. Mitchell says that with virtualization technologies where desktop applications reside and where they run is becoming irrelevant.

[Computerworld Web Services News]

TechEd: SAP promotes ESA ecosystem

At its TechEd workshop in Vienna, SAP touted its Enterprise Services Architecture, unveiled an analytics package with IBM, talked up new adaptive computing capabilities in the NetWeaver platform and announced a security product with Siemens.

[Computerworld Web Services News]

IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal: Building an Enterprise Service Bus with WebSphere Application Server V6 -- Part 7

Ideas from the first six articles in this series on using the new messaging engine in IBM WebSphere Application Server V6 to build an Enterprise Service Bus are brought together to show how you can use an ESB to actually switch between different message protocols.

[developerWorks : SOA and Web services : Technical library]

From UML to BPEL

This article describes a new tool from part of the Emerging Technologies Toolkit version 1.1 (ETTK) released on alphaWorks which takes processes defined in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and generates the corresponding BPEL and WSDL files to implement that process. This capability is used to highlight some of the benefits of the Object Management Groups (OMGs) Model Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative: raising the level of abstraction at which development occurs, which, in turn, will deliver greater productivity, better quality, and insulation from underlying changes in technology.

[developerWorks : SOA and Web services : Technical library]

Platform makes grid technology mainstream

EGO system allows enterprise apps to run on multiple systems.

[Techworld.com OS and Servers News]

Brian Madden podcasts on VMware and Citrix present and future

The most famous expert on application virtualization (mainly Microsoft Terminal Services and Citrix products), Brian Madden, released a podcast about where today VMware and Citrix are and where they are supposed to go in the near future.


You can download it here: http://www.brianmadden.com/content/content.asp?id=499

[virtualization.info]

Apache Synapse And The Many Faces Of Mediation

If any SOA-based solution degenerates into coded frameworks, the approach will be deemed to fail. In the interests of avoiding this scenario, it is essential to understand the various forms of mediation.

[WebServices.Org Weblogs]

Recommended SOA Reading

Hey, I've received a few e-mails asking me to post recommended reading for those looking to dive into SOA, from all different areas of computing. One thing to remember is that there is more to SOA than the acronym, so it's okay to read other books that may not use the term SOA, but are still great books for those beginning their SOA journey.

[Real World SOA]

10g Graduating from Clusters to Grid

Today Oracle unveiled Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3. It's being touted as a major update to Oracle's SOA middleware platform, and it may be a major addition to enterprise Grid computing in general. One of the question marks around 10g as a "Grid" solution in the past has been whether it's really Grid technology -- or a cluster technology. Recall the three key summary points from the definition of Grid...

[Grid Meter]

Oracle upgrades app server with SOA in mind

Positioning its middleware as a comprehensive SOA platform, Oracle on Monday will roll out an upgrade to its application server that adds a business rules engine, boosts support for Web services, and features an updated ESB (enterprise services bus).

[InfoWorld: Platforms]

Demystifying SOA - Myths About SOA Web Services Architecture

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) refers to an architectural solution that creates an environment in which services, service consumers, and service producers can coexist, and still have no dependence on each other. SOA enables an enterprise to increase the loose coupling and the reuse of frequently used software assets. These software assets, together with the functionality that they provide, are called services in the SOA terminology. By nature, SOAs are complex and are typically applied to solutions with highly volatile requirements.

[Latest Articles From SOA WEB SERVICES JOURNAL]

Invoke multiple Web services operations

Develop a multi-operation Web service using Rational(R) Application Developer and deploy it using the Service Integration Bus (SIBus). Using WebSphere(R) Process Choreographer and WebSphere(R) Application Server V6.0 Platform Messaging, you can build an enterprise-class business process execution environment. (Series: Process Choreography and the SIBus, Part 1)

[developerWorks : SOA and Web services : Technical library]

New Open Source Tool soapui Released for Inspecting, Invoking and Functional Testing of Web Services

soapui is a java-swing based desktop application for inspecting, invoking and functional testing of webservices over HTTP. It is mainly aimed at developers/testers providing and/or consuming webservices (java, .net, etc).

[WebServices.Org]