Are SOA and web-services synonymous?

Amir Shevat has an very interesting article titled 'Are SOA and web-services synonymous?'. Here is an extract from his article....


"SOA is an architectural paradigm whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software applications. Applications invoke a series of discrete services in order to perform a certain task. A service is a unit of work done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a service consumer.

Web services provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications. When an application calls web-services it actually invokes remote methods on other applications with the use of XML as a communication protocol (usually over an HTTP transport protocol) ."

I very much agree with what he says in the end "The bottom line is that we need to choose the right technology to fit the right task and not to go blindly with the crowds. I guess that this is a good advice for life in general…", its so very true.

Site of the Week: Technicat

'Technicat' - owned and operated byPhil Chu in Huntington Beach, California, provides consulting and development expertise to the Internet, educational software, computer graphics and video game industries.

He has written some outstanding essays on various subjects and I just happened to read couple of them 'Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers' and 'Work Hard, Play Hard: Applying Game Design to Project Management'; I enjoyed both of them & would love to read the remaining sometime sooner;)

He also has sections on Gaming, OpenSource and Graphics. Hope you enjoyed it!

Finally Sun Microsystems Inc. debuts with ESB

Sun Microsystem Inc has rolled out its version of ESB.

Found this news on SearchWebServices,"Sun Microsystems Inc. officially entered the enterprise service bus (ESB) market today, rolling out its first upgrade of the former SeeBeyond Inc. messaging middleware and tying it together with Sun's portal, application server, Web server and development studio offerings as part of a single platform." [Read more]

Google integrates GMail with GoogleTalk

Another interesting feature gets integrated with GMail, this time its *chat*. I was pleasantly surprised with this new feature, you don't need to install any software or include/add contacts on the chat program, you get to do it with just a your gmail account. Google is right on the track to take the lead in implementing Web 2.0 and also add more value to the term 'On Demand Service' or 'Software On Demand'. This very feature would make a good example for 'Software On Demand'; What exactly do I mean by 'Software On Demand' is, you don't need to install program on your local machine to utilize the service, you just start using the service when u require.

Looking forward to use this new feature from GMail;)

Technorati:gmail | google | google talk | vivek kondur

How to be Creative by Hugh MacLeod

I have been using Del.icio.us for over one week now and thanks to my friend Suresh who referred me to Del.icio.us. Since then I have discovered few good articles/resources on various subjects @ Del.icio.us. I happened to hit this one, before stumbling upon ChangeThis. Then I started browsing the archives @ Changethis, untill I got hooked to 'How to be Creative' by Hugh MacLeod, then visited Hugh MacLeod's site which finally led me to his humor filled site where he posts his 'Blog Cards'.

The best thing about Hugh MacLeod is he touches many complex subjects like life, society, business, technology, management,etc; with ease using his creative expressions called 'Cartoons'.

Portable Apps Suite

Direct Web Remoting or AJAX

There has been lot of noise on AJAX in the past year, especially when Google announced Google Maps. I feel it has made a some kind of impact on companies who are into developing web applications. Sometime last year I happened to read few articles on AJAX and tried out few samples and could feel the difference, when compared to the traditional MVC or Struts implementation. Today one of my friend sent me a webinar link, where Joe Walker of Getahead puts his insights on AJAX. He has also developed Direct Web Remoting (DWR), which has become the most popular Ajax toolkit for Java by making browser/server interaction intuitive for Web developers.

The webinar is quite informative in understanding the technical advantages of using DWR framework, integration support for the existing web applications developed with MVC style or Spring Framework, security concerns and the challenges in AJAX implementation. Overall this webinar gives a good overview to anyone who has to decide on building a fresh web application or moving the existing one on AJAX.

Resources: Webinar with Joe Walker | Ajax with DWR | Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications - by Jesse James Garrett | Ajax Patterns | DWR Home | Ajax @ SUN

Website built on Ajax: Baconbutty.com | Chess game developed by Jesper Olsen

Source: IBM | The Server Side | SUN | Getahead | Adaptivepath | Baconbutty | Jesper Olsen