Monday, July 12, 2004

Web Services Intermediaries Infoworld recently did an interesting article surveying four vendors in the Web services intermediary space - check out: http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/07/02/27TCwsi_1.html.  A hot space that becomes naturally viable when you have a well defined message on the wire - SOAP - over a standard protocol - HTTP - defined by a rich description language - WSDL.  Simple but amazing useful functionality for those in the space.  Related but not quite as explicitly, I covered a bit of the topic at a 1000 foot level in this Oracle Magazine article a few months ago: http://otn.oracle.com/oramag/oracle/04-may/o34dev_web.html comment [] 8:46:39 PM

Return to the Land of Blogging A few things have happened at Oracle since my last blog entry many months ago ... most notably for me being the acquisition of Collaxa, now located at http://otn.oracle.com/bpel  and known as the Oracle BPEL Process Manager - a thinly disguised project to BPEL insiders that I spent close to a year involved in getting to know the amazing folks on that team and getting a huge amount of satisfaction when they decided to join forces with Oracle.  That Oracle has the industry leading BPEL implementation and the folks who built it is in my opinion will be defining piece of our SOA/Web services story going forward. My role has changed somewhat now as a result of that - the team is part of our integration team whereas I made a long winded decision to stay in the core J2EE and Web services team to focus on the core Web services runtime environment.  The downside is that I will not be working day by day with Edwin and his great crew; the upside is that we have a lot of equally interesting work to flesh out the rest of our Web services story of which OracleAS 10.1.3 (http://otn.oracle.com/tech/java/oc4j/1003/content_preview.html) which will be our foundation for  JAX-RPC, WS-Security, WS-Reliability, WS management and the WS environment that the Oracle BPEL Process Manager will be running on (currently they run on OC4J 9.0.4 as that is our production stack).  Just like I said for BPEL over the last year that we have lots on the go, trust me that that the 10.1.3 release will be a pretty interesting one for the core Web services runtime.  Not quite as dramatic as the Oracle BPEL Process Manager but a significant amount of engineering has gone into the Web services area in 10.1.3.   Over the last few months in my Oracle Magazine articles have been discussing various features in that release as they become available in the developer preview on OTN and will continue to do so going forward. Hopefully this entry marks the return to regular blogging -- combined with a job re-focussing, many events like JavaOne, Oracle year end,  internal activities etc etc ... I simply ran out of cycles for keeping up the blog.  A couple of articles I have written during this quiet period that might be of interest to folks: * Opening the Blackbox of Integration: Moving toward a standardized integration architecture - http://sys-con.com/story/?storyid=45525&; - Hmmm ... did I have BPEL on the brain when that was happening? * Weaving Web Services Together: Business Process Execution Language streamlines connecting and coordinating Web services. http://otn.oracle.com/oramag/oracle/04-jul/o44dev_web.html - this one has some entertainment value as it also was in the physical copy of Oracle Magazine a day or so before the official announcement of Collaxa (a calculated gamble that worked nicely!) Going forward I will continue to drill down in Web services areas in this blog ... focusses going forward for me will be core Web services issues but you will see a lot more discussion on Web services management, WS-Security, reliability and foundational pieces that make for a feature rich, high performance, highly interoperable Web services runtime and development environment. comment [] 8:30:41 PM