During the evolutionary SOA session at the Denver NFJS Symposium Tour by Neal Ford, I was decidedly convinced that XAware is right on track with the XAware 5.0 open source software.

Neal describes a service as:

• accessible from a variety of "clients" (applications or users)
• coarse-grained, self-contained business function
• sits idle until arequest for processing is received
• always available, does not need to be instantiated or deployed (like components)
• does not have knowledge of the context in which it is used

The session emphasized multiple kinds of implementation to include; REST (REpresentational State Transfer), the WS-* standards, POX, and the Enterprise Service Bus. Neal eliminated ESBs as sweeping the mess under the carpet, the spaghetti is still there, but hidden in a vendor box. You will eventually be held ransom by the ESB vendor and be locked-in for the whole network.

What is the Solution? Don't fight the spaghetti, embrace it!

Spaghetti Oriented Architecture

• SOA is spaghetti agnostic

• fighting against spaghetti is usually unsuccessful
• this doesn't mean integration should be undertaken without due diligence
• services designed for integration with any consumer
• integration is decentralized

Neal's describes the best solution as SOA & the web services approach. This is XAware!

Neal was right on track with his approach. Instead of posting Neal's bullets, I'll create a few bullets relating XAware's solution using SOA and web services

• With XAware:
•  Any service created can be exposed as a webservice
• Sub processes can be created in XAware using functoids, mashing data, or through extensions
• With XAware, you can have SOAP as the transfer mechanism along with REST, HTTP, or a Java API
• SOAP messages created by XAware can be your EAI backbone
• The XAware services support copybook, file, HTTP, JAVA, JMS, Mutiformat, SOAP, SQL, StoredProcedure, JMX, Salesforce, and XML Mapping.

Probably the most captivating comment from Neal's session, "ESB/EAI morphs into toolkit for implementing web services."  With XAware 5.0, you don't have to write any Java to create these services or to create a client that consumes services created by a provider.