Mashed Articles

The end of the year gives some time to relax, watch television and to read the many blog posts that have piled up in my reader. A lot of cloud stuff obviously, predictions for next year. James Urquhart mentions 7 businesses to watch out for, and on nr 2 is “Enterprise Integration as a Service”. Couldn’t agree more.

Urquhart refers to Boomi as an example of Integration through the cloud. I remember Boomi as a smaller B2B software vendor from around the period the AS2 protocol took off. Boomi’s cloud offering and pricing remain a bit blurry to me. Should play around with the 30-day trial some day. But not today, Dec. 31st

What I don’t understand is that John M Willis picks RabbitMQ as the “Best Cloud Orchestration Tools in the Cloud”. RabbitMQ is a messaging solution based on the AMQP standard protocol. Maybe I’m overlooking something, but I don’t see any AMQP whatsoever in the B2B integration space.

My colleague Jeroen pointed me to this 2006 article on WS-RM by Clemens Vasters of Microsoft. An excerpt:

Truth be told, the reliability of WCF’s WS-ReliableMessaging-based implementation by itself is “only” as good as it can be for a volatile reliable messaging mechanism
…
If you need end-to-end durable reliable messaging with full support for transactional I/O you need an infrastructure that’s in control of both ends of the communication path and as it happens, such an infrastructure is part of the Windows operating system family. If these are your requirements, your WCF binding of choice is likely the NetMsmqBinding.

So let me repeat it again: if you don’t want to loose messages, use a prorprietary messaging solution (e.g. MSMQ) or use a B2B protocol such as AS2. Or use AMQP once it gets some traction and is supported by larger IT players. Microsoft joined the AMQP working group in Oct. 2008. If Microsoft would release an AMQP implementation with WCF binding, that would be headline news!

Last week I was at the Devoxx conference in Antwerp. Just 20 kms from where I live and the city where I grew up. Being one of the steering members, I gave a hand here and there and was involved in selecting the talks, in particular regarding SOA and security. I really enjoyed the conference, some of my highlights:

• Logo: simply love it
• Venue: the Metropolis movie theater is a really nice location and the the logo on these big screens looks soooo nice; the seats are just a bit too comfortable: my eyes seem to close automagically
• The team: I really had fun times this week with Frederik, Sven, Valérie, Jo, Stijn, Stephan, Gert, Dan, …
• DataPower: the IBM partner talk had obviously some commercial aspect, but some insight on XML threats and the idea of an ‘ESB in hardware’ were simply awesome
• Paul Fremantle‘s talk on complex event processing and the conversation afterwards, e.g. on AMQP and the “unreliability of WS-ReliableMessaging” (Paul is the WS-RX spec lead)
• XSLT 2.0 by Doug Tidwell: XML remains relevant and Dough can bring his story in such a funny way (thanks Robin for arranging this)
• REST talk by Stefan Tilkov: although I have a more biased view on the REST and WS-* story, Stefan brings his message so well

And so much more: JAX-RS talk, OpenMQ, XML Persistence by John Davies and meeting Mr Ivar Jacobson at the Devoxx reception desk.

Already looking forward to Devoxx 2009! And thinking about new topics and speakers in the SOA/security area for 2009: Smooks, more cloud computing, new ESB features, BPM and BPEL (BPELScript?), design- and runtime governance of services, Master Data Management, new XML stuff, claims based security, trusted computing, … Any suggestions?