Mashed Articles

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?

I’m always on the lookout for good books in the area of Integration, SOA, BPM and Web Services. I recently skimmed through a couple. None of them are medal winners, but some parts are worth the read.

Through my ACM membership, I have access to a limited list of books on books24x7. One of them was “Enterprise Architecture and Integration – Methods, Implementation, and Technologies“. Each chapter is written by a different group of authors. The quality of the different chapters and authors varies strongly. The best part is the 1st chapter, written by Wing Lam and Venky Shankararaman, the editors themselves. It is really great! The authors give a great overview on EAI and its relationship with SOA/BPM. The following chapters by differents authors are (in my opinion) of lower quality. The 4th chapter was interesting again as it discussed SAP Netweaver and SAP XI.
If you have access to books24x7, go check out that 1st chapter. But don’t spend your money on the book itself.

Via pdfchm.com, I stumbled upon “SOA Approach to Integration – XML, Web Services, ESB and BPEL in real-world SOA projects” by by Matjaz B. Juric, Ramesh Loganathan, Poornachandra Sarang and Frank Jennings. The combination of SOA and Integration in the title set my expectations high. The 1st and 2nd chapter are nice introductory material. But further down, the chapters don’t go into much detail. E.g. the BPEL chapter is really about the BPEL XML syntax.

Another book available on pdfchm.com is “SOA and WS-BPEL” by Yuli Vasiliev. The title of the book should rather be “PHP and Web Services”. The book is well written. Chapters 1 to 4 go into The 5th chapter goes into BPEL; The 6th and last chapter shows how to implement an example using ActiveBPEL. And although I don’t know much about PHP, the books looks very interesting for PHP developers.

Ever had one of those conversations where you debate something for a while then it dawns on you that each party has been talking about something different? It has happened to me quite a few times recently.

One example was in relation to Business Process Modelling (BPM), which is something I grew up with and in my mind is about, well, modelling business processes. It’s a discipline that business analysts have been involved with for a years, and while the technology to support it has moved on, and arguably some of the methodologies too, the fundamental principles haven’t changed that much for a long time now. Then someone asked Freeform Dynamics to design a research study to figure out the level to which organisations had adopted BPM. When I argued during an internal project start-up meeting that you couldn’t really ask someone about when and how they were taking something on board that they had been doing for a decade or two, it turned out that the ‘BPM’ we were being asked to investigate was actually ‘Business Process Management’ and was based on a definition which included the technical side of things – workflow rules engines, SOA orchestration, and so on. Not quite the technology-independent business view of BPM that I was taught earlier in my career, but as soon as the misunderstanding was cleared up, we could design the research accordingly.

Another example was prompted by a report I read the other day claiming that Software as a Service (SaaS) is now a mature and pervasive model. This was reminiscent of claims made during a number of other conversations I have had recently with SaaS advocates, that I have been struggling to reconcile with the findings of our own research. The latter has shown quite conclusively that while larger organisations are starting to make selective use of SaaS for delivering business application functionality, ‘pervasive’ is certainly not a word that applies in this area. Then I realised that some of the advocates were throwing a whole bunch of stuff into their definition of SaaS (or the related S+S model) that I would never dream of including when discussing the delivery of business application functionality. Internet search, traditional ISP services, and even things like consumer content services, online help and automatic updates associated with desktop software can sometimes be lumped together when referring the ‘SaaS market’. Again, once the ambiguity is cleared up, you can see where people are coming from, and make a judgement on the usefulness (or otherwise) of what they are saying.

I guess we at Freeform are particularly sensitive to precision when it comes to discussing market activity, as primary research designed to figure out what’s really going on behind the buzzwords and the hype is so central to what we do. The experiences I have outlined, however, highlight how easily people can be misled by imprecise or ambiguous definitions if they are not on their guard. And with so much vested interest and evangelism driving the market, the temptation for some to spin and exploit our ever changing vocabulary is significant, so we all need to careful about what is behind those stats and definitions.