Quote of the week

" Design adds value faster than it adds cost" -Joel Spolsky

SOA definitions simplified

Brenda Michelson of PS Group has spent a lot of time in the SOA World. She has defined some of the key SOA terms in a simple way on her blog, which provides a clear insight. I found her post very useful, thought of sharing 'SOA Definitions' with rest of u.

Exploring Enterprise Service Bus[ESB]

*ESB* is yet another buzzword in the IT world currently. I am writing this post to take the snap shot at what is current status of ESBs in the market. This post has taken significant amount time for me to study the trend of ESBs and its realted Technologies, Standards, Frameworks, Patterns and ofcourse the buzzwords;). So thought i would sum it all in this post kind a one-stop-shop for the analysis of ESBs (lol).


P.S: Well most of my the knowledge on this subject is borrowed. As per the principles of DRY which states,

''Every piece of knowledge must have a single,
unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system''.

Going by the same prinicple, there are many good articles on the web, 'written' by those who have been both in the EAI era & been witness to the transformation of standards into the current platform independent standards & protocols; Some authors who follow the new breed of standards (which fall under SOA like SOAP, WSDL, WSBPEL, etc); And some authors who represent the Vendors who have some kind of implementations of ESB. All due rights are held by the respective Vendors or Groups or Authors.

So let us start from the scratch,

What Is an ESB?

An ESB is an open standards, message-based, distributed, integration solution that provides routing, invocation, and mediation services to facilitate the interactions of disparate distributed information technology resources (applications, services, information, plat-forms) in a reliable manner. That’s a lot to take in, so let’s break down the key terms in our ESB definition, as follows:

• Open Standards. Open stan-dards refers to both the ESB solution compo-nents (runtime container, messaging infrastructure, integration services, design-time notations) and the mechanisms for inte-grated resources to participate (attach, request, respond) on the bus.
• Message-Based. The communication mechanism of an ESB is messaging, using standard message notation, protocols, and transports.
• Distributed. The ESB runtime environment can be distributed across a networked envi-ronment for the purposes of quality of service, quality of protection, and economics.
• Routing, Invocation, and Mediation. Routing, invocation, and mediation are the ba-sic functions of the ESB. Routing includes address-ability and content-based routing. Invocation refers to the ability to make requests and receive responses from integration services and integrated resources. Mediation refers to all translations and transforma-tions between disparate resources including security, protocol, message notation/format and message payload (data/semantics).
• Facilitate. The ESB must coordinate the interactions of the various resources and provide transactional support.
• Reliable. The ESB must guarantee message delivery.

Source:Ebizq

If u have time and want to invest in knowing how EAI evolved over a period of time. How EAI was transformed to the new age *ESB*, then you could spend some time reading this.

What are the essentials in an ESB?

Source: Ebiz and Patricia Seybold Group.

But this doesn't mean that all the Vendors of ESB agree with the feature list. Most of them provide them in their own way. Here is list for some of the Vendors & their features.

• BEA --- Aqua Logic
• CapeClear --- ESB
• Cordys --- ESB
• Fiorano --- ESB
• Firona --- Xtended Web Services Management Suite
• HP --- Adaptive Enterprise Services
  
• IBM --- ESB
• Iona --- Atrix
• Oracle --- ESB
• PolarLake --- Integration Suite
• Progress --- SonicESB
• Tibco --- ESB
• SeeBeyond --- eInsight

Now we know what is an ESB, their features and also some of the Vendors in this arena. There are many Use-Cases around which fits perfectly for these infrastructre products, so i wouldn't be venturing into them. One thing which has been constantly lingering in my mind is the fact that every major infrastructre Vendor wants to jump into the Bandwagon of ESB or ESB-styled products and offer services on them. This is what Ronan Bradley, CEO of PolarLake had to say when i asked him about the numerous flavours of ESB sprouting in the market on his blog,


"With regard to question around ESB vendors - there are already many who either claim that they have an ESB - or in the case of IBM and more recently Tibco claim that they have been selling one for years (a claim that I find bizarre and incredible).



If the market growth continues, the number of vendors may well grow further. That is why it is important for the user to focus on what they are trying to do rather than abstract marketing driven definitions (perhaps this is stating the obvious). "

I agree with Ronan, that there is enough room for all the major vendors, but looks like there will be some tough competition from the open source world. As far as i know, currently there are 2 players in ESB, they are Mule and ServiceMix.

Not to leave our prime Open-Source player, Apache, which has finally made its plans of entering the infrastructure software development by announcing the project Synapse. Since, Apache, the Mother of Open-Source Projects has ventured into the development of an ESB, i guess the other players should take a note of it. May be it is too early to say anything about Synapse, but you definitely can't write them off. Moreover, Synapse has some highly credible industry support with Sonic Software, Blue Titan, Iona and Infravio all pitching in. If you have noticed that some of the key vendors of ESB are pitching into the development of Synapse, apart from WSO2 being the key contributor. Switching groups has already begun, if u didn't get what i mean then you should read this.


Here are some of the articles relating to ESB, which I have really enjoyed reading.

The ESB vs WS "Fabric" - a Phoney War? - By Ronan Bradley, CEO of PolarLake.

Incremental Integration & the ESB - By Ronan Bradley, CEO of PolarLake.

Following are some links to interesting articles on ESB @ Ebizq

Enterprise Service Bus Q&A Part I

Enterprise Service Bus Q&A Part II

ESB and BPEL: Changing the Rules of Integration

The Omnipotent Extensible ESB

ESB Fills Management Gaps for Web Services

Following are some links to interesting articles on ESB @ LooselyCoupled

ESB: time to grow up

All about ESB

Let me know if there are any more interesting articles on ESB.

Source: Apache, BEA, CapeClear, Cordys, Ebiz, Fiorano, Firona, Loosely Coupled, HP, IBM, Iona, Oracle, Patricia Seybold Group, PolarLake, Progres, Tibco, SeeBeyond.

Apache's Synapse

Apache's Synapse - A Web service Mediation Framework project. It is a proposal to build a set of components that work together with Axis2 and other Apache and open source projects to create a flexible transformation, management and routing system. The feature list looks impressive, and the aims of the Synapse as follows:

• a messaging and communications infrastructure;
• based on the principles of service oriented architectures;
• that provides a way of connecting disparate systems;
• that manages the connections and the routing of messages between systems;
• that intermediates and transforms messages and service interactions independently of the endpoint applications;
• that is neutral with respect to the languages and platforms that are integrated - providing first class support for C/C++/COBOL/Java/.NET and other application platforms.
  

This project implements the patterns that are often called Enterprise Service Bus or Broker. You can find more of this on Apache's Incubator.

Source: Apache.

Review - Google Talk

One more great service from Google, this time its called Google Talk. YAIM (if you didn't get what i meant, expands to Yet Another Instant Messenger) but this time its from Google's stable. Since its from Google, there must be something different from the rest.

Let me not brag too much about it, will just highlight the stuff i came across, as they say it is Integrated with GMAIL, all the contacts on your GMAIL ID are available for u, like any other IM it can be used for Instant-Messaging, you could also use it has VOIP (for Non-Techies it simply means that you can talk to another person on your list for free & the voice is clear and there is no latency).

What are the essentials for using Google Talk,

1. Must have ID on google mail or GMAIL.
   
2. Need to download Google-Talk.
3. If u wanna talk then u need to have speaker and a microphone.

Would like to thank Satz who introduced me to GoogleTalk.

Enjoy the power of Google Talk.

Culture of Mobility

Yesterday i came across this interesting site on Nokia, its called the Culture of Mobility - its Vibrant, Colorful & Trendy.

Source: Nokia.

Sony Ericsson announces new Mobile Walkman phone: W550 0

So all those who want to have feel of W550 will have to wait till Q4. Wanna know more about the phone??? then click here. The phone specification can be found here.


Source: SonyEricsson.

Blinder by Google

I have admired Google for their creative and innovative ideas in making software simple & fun. But sometimes even the most innovative companies create blunders, can't believe it?, then try the following steps yourself and enjoy the blunder.

1. Open google
2. Click 'language tools' link.
3. Write "Aishwarya's mom is very nice" in 'Translate text:' textbox.
4. Select "English to Spanish" in the below combo.
5. Press Translate and wait for translation.
6. Now copy the translated text from the above text and paste it in the 'Translate text:' textbox.
7. Select "Spanish to English" in the below combo.
8. Press Translate and wait for translation.
9. Enjoy.

A Practical Explanation and Example of SOA for the non-Techie - Eric Stahl

If you are working in IT {Information Techonlogy} domain, then by now you should would have heard everyone across the chain ( CTOs, Architects, Developers, Marketing teams ) talking about *SOA* in one form or other.

Accorindg to some of the Research and Analysis firms like Zapthink, Gartner, Forrester Research, have predicted that SOA would be the buzzword in the year 2005. I did write a post about this in the month of Jan'05, in case u want to read click here.

Eric Stahl, Senior Director of Investor Relations at BEA, gives a very simple practical explanation & example of the use of SOA. As Eric says at the end of his post "Hopefully this entry helps cut through some of the "SOA" buzzword noise...".

The example really makes sense from the perspective of a Non-Techie, to provide the feel of what SOA & the associated Standards has to offer for the future. I really enjoyed reading the example & the explanation.

Source: dev2dev-blogs,BEA.

Few interesting blogs

Today i happened to come across few interesting blogs and i thought it would be of much use to those on the *Virtual World* who hit this blog-space regularly.

1. Werner Vogels
2. Why smart people defend bad ideas - Scott Berkun
   
3. Blogs by Googler
   

Arvind Thiagarajan - Innovator

I stumbled upon this article and was pleasantly surprised while reading the article which speaks about his invention 'EchoView' and his company 'MatrixView'. EchoView is an algorithm developed for compressing larger files with less loss of data, interesting read.


Source: Rediff.

How digital era is changing Bollywood

You feel good when u know that Techonolgy is rapidly catching up with every strata of the society in some form or other. The Technology revolution also brings many changes in the equilibrium of the system which is well established. The adaptation of the Technology always lies at various players involved in the system.

Source:Rediff.