The SOA Petri Dish

Looking down a microscope at my son’s school, I was amazed that all those ‘things’ could co-exist in such a tight shoulder-to-shoulder world. These organisms even thrive in this type of environment, dying if you separate one of the 'things' from the group. It might be obvious but I’ll say it anyway: SOA is like that. It’s impossible to exist alone, even deadly. But learn to co-exist with your neighbors and you flourish.

I've also seen many posts on similar subjects, such as Eric Norlin's 'Assembling the disparate bits' post. And because JackBe makes both SOA ‘consumer’ products (a mashup consumer interface, Dash, and an Ajax IDE, Studio) and ‘producer’ products (a SOA virtualization and mashup server, Edge), we’ve seen the SOA Preti Dish in action too many times to count. We’ve had the opportunity to interoperate with many, many third-parties in the SOA world. JackBe has both consumed BEA portlets and had applications (can we call them 'applicationlets'?) consumed by a BEA portal. We’ve brought in services third-party ‘service’ types including EJB, SOAP, REST, RSS, and XML, and from many function-specific vendors like Salesforce, Bloomberg, X-Ignite, StrikeIron, Amazon, Yahoo Pipes, Google, ESRI, Ionic, and some really cool demographic data providers that we'd love to mention but can't. We’ve incorporated third-party Ajax widgets from Dojo, ActiveWidgets, DynamicDrive and others. It’s a dizzying list. And every day we add more.

None of these technologies or technologists could live alone. I find it impossible to believe that any single vendor could provide the innovation, engineering and support behind the broad array of SOA infrastructure out there. And this buffet-style development changes many things for the better. Flexibility is the major improvement. And it’s one that is not emphasized enough. Don’t like the service you are using? Need a better 3-dimensional graph? Find another vendor. The cost and risk of change is much smaller than it used to be.

Life under the microscope can be tough. But it’s worth it.