NetBeans 5.5 has been released

Here you go, the official release of NetBeans 5.5.

ESB market report

A decent report on the state of the ESB market and the players in it. This is a good follow-up to some on-going discussions on the ESB versus XML appliances and content switches/smart routers. Scott Mark posted some thoughts on it which was followed up with a posting from Todd Biske. I think you will see from the report that Anne Thomas Manes over at Burton is an advocate of the XML appliance. My company is a client of the Burton group. Anne came and spoke with us about this and other SOA related topics earlier this year. The XML appliance was discussed a lot.

I'm still undecided on the appliance concept. You can see my thoughts over on Scott Mark's blog. Still it is becoming interesting and probably worth a look. It's now on my radar which is the first step to more serious research.

Culture Clash?

webMethods recently acquired Web Services Management Leader Infravio. For those of you who don't know, Infravio has contributed a lot to the open-source movement. You can read about it here. If you are familiar with Apache Synapse or the Eclipse SOA Tools Project (STP) then you can thank Infravio.

I think this brings up several interesting questions. Will webMethods snuff out Infravio's support of Apache Synapse and Eclipse STP? Will Infravio bring a more open mindset to webMethods? How will Jack Bauer escape from the Chinese government? Stay tuned it should be very interesting.

Netbeans 5.5 Beta 2

I think Netbeans is a pretty good Java IDE from a first glance. But it is really a whole lot more than just Java. It is packed , without being bloated can you say WebSphere, with features. One of the cool features is the XML schema designer.

Check this out -


Notice the Selected Design Pattern: Venetian Blind. This is pretty cool. It will apply the design pattern to whatever XML schema you currently have it in. It supports Salami Slice, Venetian Blind, Garden of Eden (New to me) and Russian Doll.

Of course the tool has about a million other features as well including a pretty nice UML tool. I don't want anyone to think I've done any kind of serious evaluation on this but at first glance it is promising. And of course it is free from Sun like most of their software these days.

A better POD

So the next time you are thinking about getting one of those PODS that seem to sit in everyone's yard forever, try one of these out. Way cooler.

Enterprise Data Integration @ SOA WEB SERVICES JOURNAL

Articles (pretend articles) like this really get me going. Erin happens to work for Altova which makes XMLSpy, a very useful tool by the way. I think at least a pretense of being objective would have been nice. Otherwise a big disclaimer at the beginning of the article as opposed to the end. Not to pick on Erin because a lot of folks do it but these types of articles which are really just sales pitches should be appropriately titled. I don't think Industry Commentary cuts it.

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

A little Unix humor for today...

Enter The JBoss Matrix

I don't know about you but this clustering solution from JBoss eh I mean Redhat looks promising. The in memory persistence replication in particular will be fun to try out. It actually kind of makes sense when you consider the average life expectancy of a single transaction is not very long. Message clustering has always been a challenge with most of the products out there. I like this more innovative approach. We will have to see how well it holds up.

"When someone mentions SOA reuse, I cringe"

Here is another article on the reuse war that is just getting started. My perspective from my little corner of the world is that it is very difficult to achieve business reusable services. Just as the article points out, getting the top down cross organizational business perspective is a very difficult task in the real world. Don't believe me, go try it.

Another thing the article said was around vendors forcing IT into SOA with their products. I'm not buying that. Shipping me a product that has its API's exposed as Web Services is not SOA which is what most vendors are doing. I do think vendors are putting a lot of pressure on IT to buy into the SOA concept buy trying to upsale their products. But still not SOA.