<<In these embryonic days of service-oriented architecture, the
notion of what will ultimately constitute "enterprise-grade" is still
in flux, as is the role of the Java platform and, more specifically,
Java EE 5.
During this transitional period from what enterprise Java was to what
building an enterprise-grade SOAwith or without Javawill be, the
Java ecosystem players are exploring the possibilities and many are
putting their eggs in more than one basket.
Bruce Snyder, co-founder and developer for the Geronimo project and a
senior architect at LogicBlaze Inc., an open source SOA provider,
said "enterprise-grade" means different things to different
organizations, but that building an SOA should not require a
"forklift upgrade."
"Enterprise-grade is something that scales to support your business,"
Snyder said. "An enterprise-grade grade SOA should be flexible enough
to do what you need it to do, but SOA shouldn't be a great big
forklift change or an upgrade to another piece of software like EAI
[enterprise application integration] was. It's about biting off as
much as you can chew and doing as much as you want. There are
solutions out there that are forklift upgrades, they require a
substantial financial investment in software and require you to
change way you develop. That's quite a lot to swallow."
Snyder said enterprise-grade SOA should have flexibility on the back
end as well as on the developer side, and by that he means making it
easier to do things. "There's a portion of Java EE trying to
standardize on that," he said, such as the move toward annotations
with the JAX-WS spec. "It's good in terms of standardization, but in
terms of flexibility and simplifying things, I'm not sure Java EE 5
does that. I still see people going outside of Java EE to look for
solutions."
Michael Bechauf, vice president of industry standards at SAP AG, said
enterprise-grade SOA "must be secure, reliable and interoperable.
However, beyond those technical characteristics, what's key is that a
company needs to employ a consistent set of design rules across all
its services. The services also need to be designed in a way that
they can cover use cases across multiple industries. They need to use
a consistent set of data types that interoperate with common industry
vocabularies such as RosettaNet."
He continued, "The services need to have the right granularity to
allow for both coarse-grained, message type, business-to-business
communication, as well as fine-grained access into a business system
so that customers can exploit those services for business flexibility
and best practices in their lines of business. For fine-grained
services, each call needs to transition the business system from one
consistent state into another. Sometimes, flexibility needs to be
traded-off against system consistency."
Enterprise-grade SOA means addressing all of the "ilities" --
scalability, reliability, manageability, etc. -- said Shaun Connolly,
vice president of product management at JBoss Inc., and to address
them in a way "that these capabilities are just baked into the
platform." This would include the ability to get enterprise-grade
features without the need to upgrade licenses or products, for
example, and the ability to interoperate with existing
infrastructure, he said.
All this said, organizations have to be asking themselves, just how
much work is involved in taking existing enterprise apps and
componentizing/service-enabling them? And does Java EE 5 make it
easier?
"Java EE 5 as a technology platform has made it dramatically easier
to service-enable an existing Java application," said SAP's Bechauf.
"For example, Java annotations can easily service-enable a Java
method. Tools also may help a great deal with the service-enabling.
If you wanted to do this with a bare-bones IDE and had to write all
of the code yourself using Web service APIs, it could be a fair
amount of work. If you were to use a tool which helped automate this
process, it would be much easier. For instance, tools such as SAP
Composite Application Framework make service-enabling an application
much easier." SAP CAF is based on the Eclipse 3.2 tools platform.
JBoss' Connolly said the work involved "depends on how the components
being service-enabled were architected. For example, were they
designed for distributed multi-threaded access? One of the things we
always recommend to our customers is that they put in place an SOA
governance structure so they spend the time on service-enabling the
components/functionality that will actually drive business value.
Just service-enabling everything, without keeping an eye towards the
business goals, misses the entire point of why SOA has the ears of
the CIOs."
Reaching beyond the platform
Vendors that are part of the EE 5 ecosystem like SAP and JBoss are
offering broader capabilities than just Java EE 5, said Jason
Bloomberg, a senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. "You still need
scalable, transactional Web sites, and if you want [IBM] WebSphere or
[BEA] WebLogic that makes sense, but if you're looking to do SOA
you're not going to focus on the same priority. It's what BEA is
struggling with as it moved to SOA 360 º, for example. [Vendors] are
rethinking what it means to provide a SOA platform."
BEA's SOA 360º platform spans the three BEA product families
Tuxedo, WebLogic and AquaLogic and is supported by the BEA
WorkSpace 360º collaborative tooling environment. "With SOA 360 º,
Java EE 5 is only a small piece," said Bill Roth, vice president of
the BEA Workshop Business Unit at BEA Systems Inc.
While Roth said the company is not looking to distance itself from
the Java platform, "are we saying things other than J2EE? Yes, for
example an ESB is a useful way to think. There's no J in SOA, it
opens up whole new world for us. The SOA world is not necessarily
Java. Is Java the most productive platform for creating building
blocks in SOA? Of course. Is it the best way to build everything? No."
Roth said he views building composite applications and Java EE 5 as
orthogonal. "There are new technologies like Service Component
Architecture, which describe how larger services are woven together
and BPM [business process management], which talks about how services
talk to each other. Java EE 5 [is about] how to build better
services, but the process of weaving them together as an SOA is at a
much larger level and might not involve Java."
Richard Monson-Haefel, a senior analyst at Burton Group Inc., points
to the slew of technologies from Java vendors "that aren't related to
Java EE at all. They have a large investment in those platforms and a
large client base, so the majority will want to upgrade [to Java EE
5], but not because it's superior to everything else."
Monson-Haefel said the Service Component Architecture (SCA)
initiative "is supported by all the big players in EE space and SCA
has little or nothing to do with EE."
SCA supports service implementations written using a variety of
programming languages, including object-oriented languages, as well
as Java, PHP, C++, and Cobol; XML-centric languages such as BPEL and
XSLT; and declarative languages such as SQL and XQuery.
The fact that SCA is implemented on top of Java EE, but "doesn't
reference Java EE specifically," is telling, Monson-Haefel said. "I
don't have a lot of confidence that SCA will go anywhere, but all the
vendors [involved] is indicative they're hedging their bets."
"SAP is heavily engaged with IBM, BEA, Oracle [and others], in
building SCA," said SAP's Bechauf. "It's certainly true the larger
application server vendors have come together and said, 'let's see if
can use Java EE as a stable Java platform, but have more rapid
release cycles for particular SOA technologies.' People want a stable
Java platform, but they also want rapid innovation when it comes to
SOA techniques. The way we're working in SCA is very rapidly; it's
technology that uses EE 5 and rapidly develops innovation on top of
that."
Bechauf continued, "Java EE 5 takes certain measures to reduce API-
centric nature; for example, it adopts the POJO [Plain Old Java
Object] model for EJBs. However, further simplification of the JEE
model is possible, specifically in regards to creating enterprise-
class composite applications involving existing and new assets." He
said efforts like SCA and Service Data Objects (SDO) are more
metadata driven and less API-centric. "Based on our recent
implementation experience of JEE 5, we are currently defining how JEE
can evolve to support the SCA and SDO technologies," he said.
Transition or stepping stone?
Monson-Haefel said Java EE is in transition. "Look at the focus of
Java EE, it was almost entirely focused on simplifying the platform.
That wouldn't be a major objective if they didn't sense that was the
direction IT was going. The grassroots development community wants
platforms that solve problems easier."
Nick Kassem, technology director for Web services at Sun Microsystems
Inc., said rather than a transition, Java EE 5 is a "stepping stone"
to SOA. "Java EE 5 offers a rich infrastructure; it's an enabler to
SOA as opposed to a transition platform."
In fact, Kassem said, the story is still unfolding for what he calls
"transactional Web services" and the intersection of the Enterprise
Java Beans environment and the Web services environment. The recent
release of NetBeans 5.5 -- an open source IDE that extends existing
Java EE features, including Java Persistence support, EJB 3.0 and JAX-
WS -- is a step toward bringing those environments together, he said.
"We're getting away from the notion that you have EJB developers and
Web services developers. The investment our customers are making in
EJB 3.0 will be preserved and brought into the SOA world. EJB
developers are developing mission-critical applications. You have to
bring that into the SOA-centric world."
Part 3 of this series will look at the role of the Java Community
Process in the wake of the Java EE 5 release. What are its current
priorities? What has been learned from the initial half-year of Java
EE 5? And what may lie ahead?>>
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