Collaxa seemed to like it. I didn't. I skimmed the whitepaper. First, anyone who still thinks in terms of a "bus" just doesn't get it. Web Services Architecture (WSA) is network-oriented, which means "routing" happens at the SOAP message level. Routing is what distinguishes a bus from a network, thus the "Normalized Message Bus" shown in the white paper's functional architecture should be a "Normalized Message Network."
Second, the key to business integration is interoperability, and interoperability is best achieved by standardizing at the network (or wire) level--not at the software binding level. Thus, the real action in business integration is defining the identifiers, formats, and protocols (IFaPs) that enable business process interoperability across heterogeneous business processes.
Don't get me wrong, standardizing the J2EE environment (language) bindings that enable access to the emerging IFaPs that define the WSA is necessary work, but it is merely the icing on the cake (made from syntactic sugar BTW <grin>). Focusing on the J2EE bindings (whether you call them SPIs or APIs) or the container model as the key to business integration success is like focusing on the Winsock APIs or Berkeley Sockets APIs instead of the TCP/IP IFaPs as the key to network integration success!
The software/API mindset of Sun/Java rears its ugly head again in this white paper. And here I thought seemingly metadata-centric JSRs (175, 181, 207, 208) were a sign of hope. What's ironic is that the description of the proposal for JBI (JSR 208) seems to get it, i.e., it discusses the need for standard metadata (aka IFaPs). But that understanding is absent from the white paper, which barely mentions metadata. I guess I'll have to wait to see the spec.
9:36:24 AM 
