API Management: The missing link for SOA success

Nearly 2 years ago I tweeted:



Well, unfortunately, I had it a bit wrong.

APIs and service do have a very direct and 1-1 relationship: an API is the interface of a service. However, what is different is that one's about the implementation and is focused on the provider, and the other is about using the functionality and is focused on the consumer. The service of course is what matters to the provider and API is what matters to the consumer.

So its clearly more than just a new name.

Services: If you build it will they come?

One of the most common anti-patterns of SOA is the one service - one client pattern. That's when the developer who wrote the service also wrote its only client. In that case there's no sharing, no common data, no common authentication and no reuse of any kind. The number one reason for SOA (improving productivity by reusing functionality as services) is gone. Its simply client-server at the cost of having to use interoperable formats like XML, JSON, XML Schema, WSDL and SOAP. 

There are two primary reasons for this pattern being so prevalent: first is due to a management failure whereby everyone is required to create services for whatever they do because that's the new "blessed way". There's no architectural vision driving proper factoring. Instead its each person or at least each team for themselves. The resulting services are only really usable for that one scenario - so no wonder no one else uses them!

Writing services that can service many users requires careful design and thinking and willingness to invest in the common good. That's against human intuition and something that will happen only if its properly guided and incentivized. The cost of writing common services must be paid by someone and will not happen by itself.

That's in effect the second reason why this anti-pattern exists: the infrastructure in place for SOA does not support or encourage reuse. Even if you had a service that is reusable how do you find out how well it works? How do you know how many people are using it? Do you know what time of day they use it most? Do you know which operations of your service get hit the hardest? Next, how do others even find out you wrote a service and it may do what they need? 

SOA Governance (for which WSO2 has an excellent product: WSO2 Governance Registry) is not focused on encouraging service reuse but rather on governing the creation and management of services. The SOA world has lacked a solution for making it easy to help people discover available services and to manage and monitor their consumption. 

API Management

What's an API? Its the interface to a service. Simple. In other words, if you don't have any services, you have no APIs to expose and manage.

API Management is about managing the entire lifecycle of APIs. This involves someone who publishes the interface of a service into a store of some kind. Next it involves developers who browse the store to find APIs they care about and get access to them (typically by acquiring an access token of some sort) and then the developers using those keys to program accesses to the service via its interface.

Why is this important? In my opinion, API Management is to SOA what Amazon EC2 is to Virtualization. Of course virtualization has been around for a long time, but EC2 changed the game by making it trivially simple for someone to get a VM. It brought self service, serendipitous consumption, and elasticity to virtualization. Similarly, API Management brings self service & serendipitous consumption by allowing developers to discover, try and use services without requiring any type of "management approval". It allows consumers to not have to worry about scaling - they just indicate the desired SLA (typically in the form of a subscription plan) and its up to the provider to make it work right. 

API Management & SOA are married at the hip

If you have an SOA strategy in your organization but don't have an API Management plan then you are doomed to failure. Notice that I didn't even talk about externally exposing APIs- even internal service consumption should be managed through an API Management system so that everyone has clear visibility into who's using what service and how much is used when. Its patently obvious why external exposition of services requires API Management.

Chris Haddad, WSO2's VP of Technology Evangelism, recently wrote a superb whitepaper that discusses and explain the connection between SOA and API Management. Check out Promoting service reuse within your enterprise and maximizing SOA success and I can guarantee you will leave enlightened.

In May this year, a blog on highscalability.com talked about how "Startups Are Creating A New System Of The World For IT". In that the author talked about open source as the foundation of this new system and SOA as the load bearing walls of the new IT landscape. I will take it to the next level and say that API Management is the roof of the new IT house.

WSO2 API Manager

We recently introduced an API Management product: WSO2 API Manager. This product comes with an application for API Providers to create and manage APIs, a store application for API Developers to discover and consume APIs and a gateway to route API traffic through. Of course all parts of the product can be scaled horizontally to deal with massive loads. The WSO2 API Manager can be deployed either for internal consumption, external consumption or both. As with any other WSO2 product, this too is 100% open source. After you read Chris' whitepaper download this product and sit it next to your SOA infrastructure (whether its from us or not) and see what happens!

Its not just standalone BPM that is dead!

There was a thread recently on InfoQ asking whether standalone BPMS is dead.

Yes it is dead.

But, that's not the only standalone thing that is dead! Standalone Business Rules Systems is dead. Standalone Application Servers are dead. Standalone ETL products are dead. Standalone Messaging products are dead. Standalone ESBs are dead. Standalone Enterprise Content Management systems are dead. Standalone Security products are dead. Yes, they're all dead.

They're all dead because customers are tired of being integration companies. What happens when a customer buys one of these standalone BPMS/BRS/ETL/etc. products is that the customer has to figure out how to integrate it to the other standalone products they've bought from other vendors. How does that help the customer's IT shop deliver business value to their organization?

Enterprise problems don't come neatly packaged into BPM problems or Business Rules problems or Data Transformation problems or any one such well defined category. Instead, enterprise problems are complex problems that require an entire repertoire of tools which can be combined nicely to solve the problem at hand. Attempting to build solutions to these complex problems with a single sledgehammer approach is one of the reasons why many IT projects take so long to complete and end up being so expensive.

The customer's IT shop is like the place which maintains the vehicle that the enterprise's IT is. What happens after a few years of taking standalone products and trying to live by their rules (not to mention their expensive consultants) and creating hodge-podge solutions is that the car ends up looking like this:

That's why enterprise middleware needs to be 100% internally self-consistent and fully integrated. Without that, every turn may drive the IT shop into a wall. Behind every dark spot on the road could be a pot hole. Or, at best, the IT shop is not able to drive the car down the freeway with cruise control turned on .. instead its constantly hitting speedbumps.

Don't like that? Well then you need middleware that can scale up and offer exactly the features that you need to solve the problem cleanly. Your IBM/Oracle/Tibco/JBoss middleware can't do that? Well then you have to try WSO2 Carbon based products .. and your car will end up looking like this :-).

The best part of course is that all of our products are 100% open source under Apache license and free for you to use. If you want absolutely world class enterprise support, call us and we'll sell it to you at $8000/server. All very simple.

WSO2 platform overview

We recently posted a slide deck that gives an updated overview of the WSO2 platform. This covers both our downloadable products as well as our cloud offerings. Enjoy!

2010 Q1 WSO2 Technical Update

View more presentations from WSO2.

Delivering a complete middleware platform under the Apache license

Let me start by wishing everyone a wonderful 2010!

Right from the get-go, WSO2 was designed to be a company that built a complete middleware platform. We set out to target the big guys who have a complete story, except with two key fundamental differences: our technical approach and our business model.

Our technical approach is of course based on Web services and SOA. For the first time in the history of computing, Web services have offered a lingua franca for how systems interact with each other. There were of course many previous attempts, but one camp or the other of the technology industry didn't agree and so there was no "English" of the computer world. Web services has changed that with every major and minor vendor supporting interoperability via Web services (XML, HTTP, SOAP and the rest of WS-*).

SOA, despite the much ballyhooed story of its demise at the beginning of 2009, is not only alive and well, but is in fact kicking butt. SOA is fundamentally an approach for how to build large scale composite systems. As an approach, it mimics the real world's service-oriented economy. As such, SOA is a fundamental concept, not some vendor-driven theory. That said, SOA, like any other technology, has had to live through the Gartner Hype Curve. If at all instead of 2009 being the year SOA died, it became the year it came out of the trough and started climbing up towards the plateau of productivity.

Of course the fall into the trough was not without reason for SOA and Web services. Much of it was driven by middleware vendors not delivering anything new, anything valuable in the form of SOA middleware. Many of them simply took their existing middleware and rebranded it the shiny new SOA gimmick. Well that of course doesn't work and the cracks in the story will force you down to the trough .. and it did.

WSO2 is unique in having started from nothing and set off on a path to build a complete middleware platform with Web services and SOA in its heart. The result is simply orders of magnitude less complexity, much better performance and overall greater productivity and lower TCO. These are not random claims from me - these have all come from our users and customers.

We now call it Lean Enterprise Middleware. Try it and see - you'll be shocked at how lean it us, how productive it is and how much money you can save by replacing your legacy or pretend open source middleware stack with ours.

Now let's talk about the business model. Right from the beginning, we made a strong commitment to releasing all of our software under the Apache license and to not attempt any bait-n-switch type acts. Believe me, that took a lot of hard work to keep going .. investors for example have a major issue with the Apache license. Why? Well because you can take any of our software and do whatever you want with it and never ever pay us. We have no legal recourse to making you pay (as dual license business models do) nor any way to force you to pay for the good stuff (as many "commercial open source" companies do). Instead, we rely on delivering real, measurable value to our customers without forcing them to pay us. Our customers love us because they pay for the value we deliver to them, not because we are using the law to force them to pay for the software they use.

When I say you can do whatever, I mean whatever - recently one of our competitors sold a support contract for one of our own pieces of software! Yes, that is possible. In this case the people who will pay the eventual price is the customer who did the stupid thing of buying support from someone who has nothing to do with the software! Remember Oracle's Unbreakable Linux? Well that didn't break Redhat and neither will this act - it just shows how low some people will go to make a buck.

So today you can download an entire enterprise middleware platform from us without registering, without paying, without any risk of bait-n-switch for absolutely no cost. How can we afford to do that and become a successful business? We have many many customers who happily pay us to provide maintenance, provide help and in general to be their technology partner. So having thousands and thousands of free non-paying users is not a problem for us - that's free marketing and helps us save the world from the ugliness that is IBM, Oracle, etc. middleware.

WSO2 is delivering on the promise to build lean enterprise middleware and deliver 100% of it as open source under the Apache license. Oh yes, we also offer it as various cloud offerings - virtual machines, or online services.

We are the ONLY vendor offering a complete enterprise middleware platform 100% open source under the Apache license.

That was all wrapped up in 2009, a tremendous year for us. In an environment of economic uncertainty, not only did we meet our targets but we beat them. We have been doubling revenue each year and this year was no different. We are on a roll :-).

Looking towards 2010, we have more work to do to make our enterprise middleware platform simply untouchable by anyone else. We're already far ahead of our competitors with our WSO2 Carbon powered platform, but we have several things planned to further leave our competitors in the dust. As I wrote in an earlier blog, we practice open development - so if you want to be part of it come on over and join us on architecture@wso2.org!

WSO2 cloud platform launched!

After a lot of hard work by a lot of people, we finally launched our cloud platform on Monday!



Check out Paul's blog for some info and of course the Web site. I will blog more later!

Talk on "State of Services" at EDGE APAC in Canberra, AU

I gave a keynote talk this morning at EDGE APAC in Canberra on the topic of SOA .. sort of a walk thru the history, what has been achieved and what the future is like. Yeah, all in 1hr.

State Of Services

View more presentations from Sanjiva Weerawarana.

WSO2 practicing open development further

From the time we started WSO2, Paul and I have both been completely certain that we always wanted to be a truly open company. That is, not a proprietary/closed company which simply releases software under an open source license, but rather a company which is more like an open source project in terms of how it does its technical work. The reason for this is because we believe that being open will bring more people to participate in our work which will eventually help us do better than our less-open competitors. Nope, we are not about to share how we do are doing business :-).

That of course comes from our Apache legacy of having started so many different projects and watching many of them succeed beyond our wildest dreams. Apache SOAP, Apache Axis, Apache Axis2, Apache Synapse, Apache WSIF are some of the examples.

We of course started the WSO2 Oxygen Tank (http://wso2.org/) for exactly that purpose. ALL of our code is there and we had a ton of different mailing lists for all the different projects.

That’s where the problems first started – by having separate mailing lists for each project/product, it became cumbersome for us to keep track of all the lists and to participate properly in all of them. Also, as we moved towards unifying our products around a single framework (as we’ve now done with WSO2 Carbon), the separate lists meant that every conversation had to be cc’ed to multiple lists – very annoying when you’re on the receiving end via multiple lists.

The other part of the problem was that we also had to have some internal communication mechanism to discuss customer issues. So we set up an internal list called architecture@ which was meant to be ONLY for customer issues – stuff that we couldn’t discuss publicly because they involved specific customer issues. However, due to a variety of reasons, over time the architecture@ list became the place where we ended up discussing many of the core issues that we went through when making the transition to Carbon.

Not any more!

We have recently done a MAJOR re-org of all the @wso2.org lists and also done a major cleanup of all internal lists. Now on wso2.org we have:

• 3 –dev lists: carbon-dev, wsf-dev and commons-dev. Carbon-dev is for all discussion related to all Carbon core stuff and every product built with it (ESB, WSAS, BAM etc.). WSF-dev is for discussion related to Web service frameworks – the low level stuff that provides WS-* functionality for Carbon. Commons-dev is to discuss all “other” projects in OxygenTank; stuff that’s common to various bits but not strictly a Carbon product or a WSF product.
• Corresponding –issues and –svn lists: to separate user discussions, JIRA notifications and SVN notifications, respectively.
• Per product –user lists and of course forums.
• New public architecture@wso2.org list which is used for all architecture discussions. If you’re more of a high level person then that’s the most interesting list to participate in to understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, how we’re doing it and of course to be part of the process of deciding what/when/how we do it. Competitors are welcome, especially those that want to de-cloak ;-).

Internally, the architecture@ list is gone for good! Instead, we now have a support-dev list to discuss customer issues and ONLY customer issues. In addition, we have a strategy@ list to discuss how we plan to take over the world (;-)) and a few other lists which will become apparent soon! However, if the discussion is related to any architectural matters related to any of our products, it WILL happen on architecture@.

Want to be part of our [extended] family? Come join us on architecture@wso2.org. See: http://wso2.org/mail.

SOA Workshop in Santa Clara, CA on Nov 3rd

Following up from the highly popular free SOA Summer Camp series we ran this past summer, we'll be offering a one-day version of this in Santa Clara, CA in November. This is again meant to be a generic intro to SOA with WSO2 products being used for samples. Its not free but priced at just $75. Interested?

WSO2 100% open source SOA platform

We've been doing a bunch of calls with customers giving them a technical update on our product platform. If you want to get a quick introduction to our 100% open source SOA product portfolio and our technical vision take a look!

2009 Q2 WSO2 Technical Update

View more documents from WSO2.

If you want to talk to us of course you can contact us via http://wso2.com/contact/.

WSO2 is 4 years old

Today is our "unofficial" official birthday - and today we celebrate 4 years of life!


Actually there's no one start date .. there was the day we incorporated the US company, the day the Sri Lankan company was incorporated, the UK company, the day we closed the funding (after changing name to WSO2 from Serendib Systems because James refused to invest without that change!), the day the US company bought the LK company, then the UK company, etc. etc. etc.. However, August 4th is around the center of all of that - which happened between July and September basically. Plus it happens to be a (chance) choice day for me .. so I was a bit selfish in declaring August 4th as our birthday ;-).

Its pretty cool to see how far we've come since the old days. Check out our Web site as of Sept. 24th, 2005 (for some reason the banner image at the top of the page is missing though). Compare that to our current site and, um, yeah we have a few more things to offer!

Its been a fun, challenging, entertaining, interesting and everything 4 years. I have no regrets whatsoever in leaving IBM to start WSO2. IBM was an awesome place, but this experience has been several notches better :-).

Working with Paul as my co-founder (going back to a "secret" meeting he, myself and one other person [who ended up not joining but who I hope to bring into WSO2 one of these days] had at his mom's place in London back in December 2004 while all three of us were still in IBM) has been the single most fun thing out of everything in WSO2. Paul and I are a team in every sense - we challenge each other to excel and there's no doubt that everything we've achieved is due to that superb teamwork. Paul's stubbornness combined (and equaled or maybe exceeded!) with mine has made us a potent team ;-). The beauty is that while we're both stubborn we also compromise and do it with no baggage. We believe in challenging ourselves and everyone to make real, pragmatic, hard-nosed, concrete decisions - we don't lie to ourselves about our capabilities or software or customers or anything.

Oh yes, its not been just 2 people who got us here. And that's the really really special gift WSO2 has given me- the chance to work with an amazing set of young and not-so-young people primarily in Sri Lanka but also in the US (with Jonathan and Katie now) and see everyone grow to becoming global personalities. We're now more than 70 strong and have an amazing group of talented, passionate, hard-working and committed people working on making WSO2 become the global success we all believe we will be.

We have people who've been with us nearly the entire 4 years and several of them are now the key leaders in various aspects: Samisa (now Director of Engineering), Hasmin (now Senior Manager of Communications), and Azeez (Architect of Carbon) being some of the key players.

I think more than 20 people have left WSO2 to join various grad schools all over the world to do PhDs in CS and related areas. I expect probably half of our current team (of more than 70) to leave for higher studies over the near few years as well. In fact, from the original group of people who joined WSO2 right at the inception, only Paul, myself and Flora (our office assistant here in Sri Lanka) are left - almost everyone else has gone to grad school!

We're a very R&D oriented company and group of people - we believe in continuous learning, graduate school and every possible way of learning as ways to continually innovate. Its hard to understand the culture of WSO2 from outside but its quite unusual :).

In summary, I will just say to every one of my WSO2 family members: Thank you.

And to our customers: Thank you for placing your trust in us and for giving us the opportunity to show you that the disgustingly corrupt software industry and the complex software it produces are not the only way.

And to our competitors: better buckle up - its gonna be a rough ride. We've only just begun.

Brain-friendly SOA security

Prabath Siriwardena, who leads all of WSO2's security work, including the Identity Server product, recently gave a summer school program on SOA security. These slides give the best no-nonsense, to-the-point, simple explanation of all of security that I have ever seen. Prabath covers authentication, authorization, WS-Security, WS-Security Policy, XACML, OpenID, Information Cards, WS-Trust, STS and more in one smooth story style presentation:

Summer School - Security in SOA

View more documents from wso2.org.

Don't believe me? Start clicking through the slides above and tell me you can stop before you got to the end!

Three SOA Case Studies

Paul had given a talk at QCon in London earlier this year discussing some use cases that we've dealt with with our customers. He has some very useful anti-patterns towards the end of the talk!

Three SOA Case Studies

View more presentations from Paul Fremantle.

Google's new OS project, SOA and stateless computing

The new Chrome OS is an interesting development indeed from Google.

The Chrome browser is pretty much an OS already - each tab is a separate process and they use shared memory to load the common code etc. etc. .. its a mini-OS. If you think about the work Chrome (the browser) does, its pretty much depending on a few low level system calls to do memory management and process scheduling plus the windowing system for graphics. So the proposed strategy of run that on a cut-down Linux kernel plus rewrite the graphics system certainly makes sense. The venerable X Window System (of MIT Project Athena fame .. early 80s!!!) has seen its time IMO and a rewrite and a rethink is in order. It would not shock me if the new system is more like NeWS, Sun's original Network Window System (think Display Postscript), one of Jim Gosling's inventions before Java. (Java is sorta the same thing .. at least in the applet days and when it was conceived as the Green project; the server-side success of Java was almost accidental. Funny how the world turns, eh?!) The beauty of that architecture in the now "network is the computer" world is that it makes it better for remote computing - you can do more granular work on the server and push down work to the client. Video for example can be built into the windowing system itself.

One can also easily argue that you really do have to rethink the entire security architecture of an OS to really make a "Web-safe OS" and one which is an instant-on experience like a TV instead of traditional computer. The use of a Linux kernel surprises me there - why be constrained by the Unix security model? I'm guessing that that decision was motivated by the daunting challenge of getting drivers written for a totally new kernel - at least by going with Linux have a pretty good likelihood that everything from digital cameras to USB disks etc. that people have and will plug into the Gnetbook will work in our lifetime.

Of course we've heard the "Microsoft killer" argument a few times .. first Netscape with Netscape and then Sun with Java. However, unlike Netscape's wishful-thinking and Sun's brain-dead JavaOS project which attempted to write an OS in Java (what were you thinking Sun?), the Google guys are not afraid to get their hands dirty and write real code in a real language (C, of course).

There's no doubt that a rethink of fundamentals of computing are in order for the network age. Google seems well positioned to take a crack at that problem and possibly make it take off due to their dominating presence and global "cool kid" brand value.

Not to seem like I'm trying to sell WSO2 stuff in this blog entry, but this approach of "client=browser=access to services on the net" fits perfectly with our vision of the enterprise back-end: that its all about services and ONLY services. Even on the front-end, we're moving towards gadgets being the only UI and are working on taking the gadget dashboard stuff we've done and making a total gadget server which is like a portal server except that instead of crappy server-side JSR 168 portlets, you just have client side gadget that talk directly to back-end services (in the enterprise and outside). Oh yeah, with Chrome I expect Google will provide an easy way to (safely) get rid of this cross-site browsing restriction nonsense; IMO that is an "old Web" thing that just needs to go away as it doesn't fit with the model any more. So in many ways, a pure Web client platform is the perfect counterpart to a service-oriented enterprise.

Here's a funny thing though - Microsoft tried to get the world to accept that a browser is inextricably tied to the OS .. and got KILLED for it (and are still paying for it in crazy EU land). Google does the same thing (except further - the browser *is* the OS) and it seems the world is very happy. Ah, how wonderful it must be the company that does no evil ;-). (Other than reading all my mail and monitoring every click I do of course.) To be fair to Google though, all technology success is a "right thing, right place, right time" thing and Microsoft was probably too far ahead of the curve to say the browser is indeed part of the OS. Google's timing is much better and in any case, this is new OS .. not a new OS that must be able to run any browser.

I'm beginning to believe more and more in a world of "stateless computing", by which I see my laptop and netbook and phone and all simply being a "throwaway" device to get to my data and services on the net. In WSO2 we use Google Apps (email, calendar, intranet sites, shared docs), SVN (all code) and run all our common stuff on EC2. What I have on my laptop is pretty much a local cache only - well with Gears you can nearly get there .. it caches enough for my experience to be "good enough". Even on the server side, we now have an internal cloud (based on Xen) where anyone can go to an intranet portal and fire up a server with the OS/software config they want and get a dynamic host name etc. and use it. (We'll be open sourcing that code soon.) That has been a totally liberating experience in terms of how we think about getting a server with some config; now its "just do it". BTW anyone who thinks the concept of "internal cloud" doesn't make sense is, in my book, an idiot.

I was thinking of going back to a desktop computer (netbooks are only good for little stuff; sorry the small keyboard and screen don't cut it for me for 24x7 use) with a big screen + a 3G connected netbook for access from other places. However, with the internal cloud stuff, I'm now thinking of getting two "nettop"s (like this totally cool looking puppy from Acer), attaching it to large monitors at office and home and a netbook to carry around. The nettop+screen works like an old X Terminal (!!!) with my real computers being personal "servers" running in the internal cloud. (Yeah I will be running an internal cloud at home too.)

That's stateless computing - if those $250 boxes give way, no problem throw it away and buy a new one. And total cost: 2 x 24-30" monitor (< $600), 2 x nettop ($500), 1 x netbook ($300) < $1500 for access and shared servers for the cloud. At home I can run that on boxes I already have or for say $1000 by a quad core box with 8GB memory plus 1TB mirrored and have a pretty safe world. In office we're running the internal cloud on 3 old Dell 1U boxes with 2 dual core processors each and each with 8GB. We can keep adding every old box we have to that cloud (soon with Zeroconf). Oh yeah, if I need public cloud servers I've got Amazon EC2.

That's liberation. Liberation from "shit my disk died and I've lost it all", from "shit my computer crashed" and more shits ;-).

Will desktop apps go away? No way. While Google Docs are usable, its nothing when compared to Open Office (which itself is nothing when compared to Microsoft Office, but that's a different blog). However, its "good enough" for quite a few scenarios and I suspect will become sufficiently better (with the improved proprietary extensions from your friendly neighborhood Google).

May you live in interesting times.

Oracle's "componentized" SOA suite

Yesterday Oracle announced a major refresh of their middleware platform - basically the result of merging in BEA to Oracle. Some stuff (like getting rid of OC4J and using WebLogic would've been a no-brainer "thank god we're done with that" decision) but other stuff must've been quite painful, especially for the people involved!

From their press release:

Oracle SOA Suite 11g delivers a complete, integrated and hot-pluggable SOA platform that enables next-generation business applications by simplifying service access, integration, orchestration, Complex Event Processing (CEP), monitoring and management.

Wow, that's a mouthful. Given that WSO2 is also in the business of building "complete, integrated and hot-pluggable SOA platform", I thought wow let me see what's so hot about Oracle SOA Suite 11g. So I thought let me check this out and visited their download site to see whether I can get my hands on that beast.

Wow, its BIIIIIIIG:

• Basic download: 1.5GB
• Required components:
• WebLogic Server: 600-800MB
  
• Repository Creation Utility: 280-360MB
• Oracle Database: 1.7-2.3GB
• JDeveloper: 934MB-1GB
  
• (Let's ignore all the optional components)

So, in order to try out their SOA Suite, I need to download somewhere between 5GB and 6GB of stuff. Um, wow?

Yes we know imitation is the best form of flattery but that's on the order of 20x the size of ALL of our platform. Yes yes I know Oracle is so much bigger and better and more powerful, but 20x better??

BUT, remember who the consumer of this stuff is: the poor brain-hurtin' developer. When I first started doing Java stuff (with JDK 1.0.8 in '94 I think), I knew every class in the JDK public APIs and quite a bit of internal stuff. Today, no Java developer even knows all the junk that's in the JDK. On top of that throw in 5-6GB of stuff and you'll have developers committing suicide!!!!!

SCA, the foundation on which Oracle's suite is built, was an abstraction layer designed to overlay JEE and WS-*. What?? Isn't that what WS-* can do too? Yep, but IBM and BEA weren't happy with losing JEE's place in the world .. and SCA was born. OK I am simplifying a bit but I do know the history as I was in IBM at the time :-).

Today's biggest problem for developers is not lack of choice of tools. There are 7 of everything. How can the average developer handle 5-6GB of stuff and figure out where to get started? That's if they were able to get it all installed.

If this is the best the Java world can offer SOA developers then Microsoft and .Net people will be very happy - they know how to make things simple for developers!

Luckily there's always WSO2 Carbon and our SOA products :-).

Or, you can always wait for Oracle 12g, the composition of Oracle, BEA and Sun.

SOA summer school!

We just announced out recession-busting SOA summer school! Huh?

This is the idea: many architects & engineers are out of work right now all over the world. What can we do to help? Well, unfortunately we can't offer them jobs right now, but what we can do is help them get better versed in SOA technology ... and hopefully that'll help them get a better job as the job market starts opening up again or allow them to get some consulting work etc. during these tough times.

So we've come up with a program of 8 online training courses that you can sign up for free. These courses are designed to give you a good overall understanding of all aspects of SOA:

• SOA Enterprise Architecture Patterns
• Scalable SOA
• Security in SOA
• SOA Governance
• Mashups for SOA
• ESB and SOA
• C++ in SOA
• BPM and SOA

These will be taught by the best and brightest in each of these areas in WSO2. These are people with a ton of experience in the respective areas and who know the technology inside out. If they can't help you get an understanding of these topics then no one can.

The overall content is generic - that is, not about WSO2 software. However, when we need to use a tool to show how things can be done in practice, we use our software. Of course we hope that the architects and engineers who take these courses will end up using our stuff, but we know there are other bits around that can do the job too. If these courses will help people get (better) jobs because they're know how to build service-oriented systems then we've achieved our objective.

Interested? Sign up here. The first course is on June 18th.

Talk on SOA & open source at Indian Ocean Naval Symposium

Last week I was invited to give a talk at the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium's first Technical Summit, which was hosted by the Sri Lanka Navy. My talk was about the role of SOA and open source in building large scale net centric systems for defence purposes. My real objective was to try to encourage both local military as well as regional militaries to set up their own open source activity (similar to what the US govt has done with foss.mil) as well as to share and collaborate at least within the Indian Ocean region.

Service Oriented Architecture for Net Centric Operations based on Open Source Technology

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The IONS is a great idea .. all 32 (?) countries which touch the Indian ocean have a lot of common naval issues to deal with. Its wonderful to see India take leadership in setting this up and to see the kind of warm collaboration that appears to be forming. The coolest system was Singapore Navy's Information Fusion Centre (which started very recently) - a full service oriented system that allows regional cooperation and mashing up of all kinds of information sources to give them a complete operational picture.

There were 30+ attendees from 18 countries. Interesting thing to see is whether we can muster up some concrete next steps!

Live web panel: What componentization means for your enterprise SOA

Paul and I will be hosting a Web panel tomorrow (Thursday, April 30th at 9:00am PDT) on the topic of componentization & SOA. We will be discussing why componentization matters and how it plays into your enterprise SOA architecture. Want to give us a grilling? Come on over and join!

See this news article for the registration information etc..

Talk on SOA & cloud computing at SOA Symposium

I had the pleasure of participating in the 2009 SOA Symposium - Government and Industry Best Practices on Thursday and Friday this past week. This was an event organized the US Department of Defence's Business Transformation Agency as part of its efforts to deploy SOA in the DoD.

Dennis Wisnosky, who was the "patron" of the event, is the Chief Architect and CTO of Business Mission Area of the Office of the Deputy Chief Management Officer, U.S. Department of Defense. He has the uneviable task of trying to get an incredibly large organization (of 3.5m+ people) adopt some type of consistent SOA architecture! That's when you realize how easy we technology providers have it .. its a LOT harder to get real, large organizations to adopt/adapt than to come out with yet another piece of cool technology :-).

I gave a talk titled "Scalable SOA in Your Own Open Source Cloud." Feedback welcome!

Scalable SOA in Your Own Open Source Cloud

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I also met Thomas Erl again (since the January meeting in Germany) and also finally met JP Morganthal and Mark Little f2f! Very much a pleasure indeed .. I just wish I wasn't so damned jetlagged and out of it most of the time. Arriving into DC without my bag didn't help either.

Convergence in Enterprise IT

In October last year I was one of the keynote speakers at the SOA Kongress in Mainz, Germany. I meant to post the slides a while ago but after uploading them to slideshare forgot to post a note about it. Better late than never:

Convergence in Enterprise IT ... the renaissance period

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Its good to be dead

According to Burton Group's Anne Thomas Manes, SOA is dead. RedMonk's James Governor points out that dead technologies make money. (Brilliant piece James!)

Phew, I'm glad we're writing software for a dead trend.