Blog Entries

SOA Integration or Interaction?

billm

I found this article on SOA World, SOA – Integration or Interaction? We tend to forget that SOA is not just about integrating , Aristo Togliatti, Aug. 26, 2008 05:45 A

Aristo says:

SOA and integration have been working together so well that we tend to forget that SOA is not just about integrating .....

He goes one to talk about how information services are about integrating with information sources, but process services (or infrastructur [...]

Technorati Link

billm

This blog is now linked to Technorati Profile If you are a Technorati user, please make sure to bookmark out posts.

Who is using XAware?

billm

We posted this question on XAware.org and received the responses shown below. 24.5% of those who have responded have said, "My role is not on this list". I am a bit surprised that we couldn't come up with a more inclusive list of choices, and somewhat curious about what we missed. Please help me out here. If your roll is not on the list, or if you think youknow what we missed, please add a comment to this post to tell us. THANKS!

< [...]

What We've Learned So Far?

billm

It has been almost six months since the GA release of XAware 5.0, our first Open Source (GPLv2) version. We just released the first upgrade, XAware 5.1 . I thought this would be a good time to review some of what we have learned so far.

We had guessed that there are between one million and five million potential users for XAware. We certainly have confirmed that there are A LOT of people interested in trying it. There have been more than 150,0 [...]

XAware version 5.1 is Now GA

billm

The General Avaiability Release of XAware Version 5.1 is now available for download at http://www.xaware.org/xaware-downloads/ v5.1 release comes after 6 months and many, many long hours of development, test, and documentation work. Thanks the the XAware core team and to our community contributors for the tremendous effort and the terrific results!

There were more than 150,000 downloads of XAware 5.0, which was a tremendous success well beyond our expectations. [...]

SOA is Not Just For Big Enterprise

billm

SOA is usually thought of as Enterprise Applicaion Infrastructure, with big "E", but smaller projects and organizations also reap big benefits from SOA.

XAware recently worked with Hire a Hero , a small U.S. non-profit organization that helps people leaving military service to find employment in the private sector. Hire a Hero used an SOA approach, using XAware Composite Data Services tools, to weave SaaS applications into a seamless business process connecting pr [...]

Off topic again - another Colorado photo

billm

These guys were playing in the hammock behind our house yesterday. Pair of bear cubs

Are ESBs Over-used?

billm

Joe McKendrick and David Linthicum have been carrying on a dialog on their respective blogs about ESBs and whether thy are, "perhaps overused, overhyped, and are in many cases not a good fit for an SOA".

Joe's posting, "Enterprise Service Busted?" does a great job of summarizing some of the thoughts on the issue and includes this poll:

Are ESBs an effective platform for SOA?

It doesn [...]

Off Topic - Colorado can be Interesting (photos)

billm

Off topic, but I thought I would share a couple of photos.

Living in Colorado can be interesting. We had two of our very intersting neighbors drop into the yard last evening.

Our first visitor came for the berries growing on the shrubs. The second seemed to be interested in our dogs, which we hurried inside (see photos).

I hear this alot, "I can't believe this is open source."

billm

It happened again today. Someone said to me, "I cannot believe this software is open source. This XAware software is just a powerful as software for which IBM, Oracle, Tibco and the like charge $50,000 plus per processor. XAware gives it away under the open source GPLv2 license. Hard to believe."

Believe it. You can use the most powerful composite data services middleware for free under the GPLv2 license. For a small fract [...]

SAP JCO Connector XAware support - Project requirements and design overview

jpmanson

I think that SAP connection support is something that XAware must have. While it is possible to connect to SAP through calls to SAP XI Web services using the SOAP connector, it is important to include the possibility of connecting with SAP JCO, which would connect directly to business objects, without passing through so many layers.

Background
XAware is Data Integration Middleware provided under the Open Software Foundation approved GNU General Public License Version 2 GPLv2. Peo [...]

Are Mashups Service-oriented?

kvandersluis

In a recent SDTimes column, David Linthicum discussed "mashups" and whether they are consistent with SOA principles. David identifies two broad categories of mashups: visual mashups like Google maps displaying locations from a sex offender database, and non-visual mashups combining two or more other services for consumption by another application or service. Non-visual mashups are exactly what I've discussed in the past as "data services mashups" (see this JavaOne [...]

EDIFACT Support XAware Sandbox Project requirements and design

danga

A few weeks ago I wrote about the missing support for EDIFACT and derived standards in Open Source XML-based Transformation Tools such as XAware and Chainbuilder.

The goal was to get the people behind these communities motivated to provide the means and tools for managing Community projects. One of these will of course be the development of EDIFACT functionality.

Meanwhile the XAware Company has established a Sandbox environment for Community Members to start their develop [...]

Transformation of EDIFACT messages using Open Source tools

danga

The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe UN/ECE started in the mid' 80 with the development of the UN/EDIFACT (United Nations Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport) standaard for EDI. In 1988 the UN/EDIFACT standaard has been adopted by the International Organisation for Standaardisation (ISO) under the ISO standard ISO 9735.

The UN/EDIFACT standard has gradually grown to the international standard for Electronic Data Interchange. But w [...]

Categories of Services

kvandersluis

In previous blogs, I have discussed contract-first service design and the benefits to constructing services as information-rich, smart endpoints. In his most recent book, SOA: Principles of Service Design, Thomas Erl formalizes and extends these ideas by defining 3 categories of services based on the type of logic they encapsulate, the extent of potential reuse, and the degree of focus on a singular domain. The service categories are:

Entity Services - modeled around business entities like c [...]

XAware IF-MAP Project

frankh

On April 28, after two years of development, the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) released IF-MAP with the intention of garnering industry adoption and utliization.

"IF-MAP provides a standardized framework for network and security devices to publish device state data--such as IP address, authentication, or virtually any meaningful information--to a central repository that can be used by other applications. This repository can be used for security, asset management, discovery, [...]

EDIFACT Community Project - Help!

billm

Would you like to help add EDIFACT functionality to XAware?

XAware community member danga is launching a project to add UN/EDIFACT capability to the XAware Open Source Data Services middleware platform. To support this community project, we have created a CVS code repository, appropriately, "
re.cvs.sourceforge.net/xaware/edifact/">edifact " within the XAware Sourceforge project .

A discussion leading up to the project can be found [...]

Feature Article in SOA Magazine

billm

XAware's Chief Architect Kirstan Vandersluis authored this featured article in The SOA Magazine , The Benefits of a Data Abstraction Layer for SOA.

Abstract: Enterprises have complex information structures as a result of evolving applications and databases deployed through the years. In addition to modern databases, environments commonly include mainframes, outdated storage technologies and custom data sources.