Clemens Vasters has a post where he questions the existence of SOA.
WhatÂ’s different now is that it is easier, cheaper and likely more productive to create bridges between systems.
He confirms my suspicions. The tools makes it easier, but it’s just not a completely new architecture paradigm. And you bridge systems only when you need it, because it adds complexity.
Update: Roy Osherove joins in here. Straight on. 🙂
Trond Andersen has a post on Integration Severs here. He’s not sure if the way they work is a good or bad thing, and I’m not sure either. I like to stay in OO land as much as possible.
I’m not really sure when an Integration Server would be a good solution. It seems to me it is on it’s way to become a bit over used. With adapters to legacy systems I can see the need, and it might reduce the time it takes to integrate these with new solutions.
In most cases it will be just as easy to set up systems for direct communication. In some cases you could argue a Integartion Server provides loose coupling, but I honestly don’t see how it makes looser coupling just because you got JMS/WS/XML going over the wire. Just another thing I should have a peek at. 😉
Matt Raible has a post about his experience with Ajax using DWR and Spring here. The demo video looks really slick, and it seems he has mostly good experiences with this. As always I’m concerned with the cross browser and maintainability stuff, but I havn’t really looked into how to handle this. I might look into trying some small snippets with DWR, I guess you can offload most of the work to the server, and do some pretty simple stuff in JavaScript to avoid most browser issues.