Year: 2005

Ted Neward has a post on the SOA hype here.

As with all technologies it is important to evaluate and make an educated decision about wether to use it. In my daily work i se very few usages where SOA will be a valid choice. Defining open, interoperable services isn’t worth it if all you are looking for is remoting. If you need to make your service available to a multitude of platforms and clients it makes sense, but many try to do this believing that there might be multiple clients in the future. And of course there is also the question of what interfaces to define. As Neward points out, looking at SOA as just session beans with brackets is not enough.

Excellent seminar. If you ever have the chance to attend one you should. Rod is an excellent speaker and he really knows how to express his ideas in a good way. Presentation is important, not just the message. 🙂

I have played a bit around with Spring lately, but of interest as well as for our current project. Only using some parts of it, but that’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to buy the whole package. You just pick the pieces that suits you right now. That was also a question from the audience during the seminar; which part of Spring to start with. Johnson recommended the IoC parts, as well as maybe the JDBC/Hibernate/iBatis template stuff.

I was a bit sceptical that it would be too much overview stuff, and basic explanations but it turned out to suit me perfectly. Some would probably have problems with grokking everything if they’re not updated on AOP, IoC, ORM and technologies like EJB. But for me it was just perfect. 🙂

Alright. It has been a good day. I’ll pick up some of the ideas and experiences from the seminar later.

We are daily using Oracle products and my impression is that previously most things they have done has been extremely tightly coupled. As an example, OC4J do not follow the standard JSP debugging API, and thus you will have to use JDeveloper if you want that feature. They have also had a tendency to store everything in their database.

On the other hand you have TopLink, which of course recommends an Oracle database. But it works with most databases, and is set up outside JDeveloper. They seem to have an open mind for integrating with most other products, and this seems to be another move in the right direction. It might not be easy to use, but it’s possible. But that is probably not the most important aspect. By publishing articles like this they are signaling that they understand that developers want to choose the necessary technologies without beeing forced to used other components. Or maybe they just understand that the market demands it. 😉

I’m very satisfied with TopLink. If this continues I might even start liking Oracle. 😉