The Rails lookalike for Java has been released in .8 version. There’s an tutorial article here.
I haven’t had much time to look into Rails or Trails yet, but a simple framework that will let me stay on the Java platform and ease web development is really tempting. It remains to see how it holds up in a real project, but I should check it out one day.
So Maven 2.0 is released. Too much work migrating my existing project I guess, but it’ll be a safe bet for my next one.
I went to a panel debate on SOA yesterday arranged by the Norwegian JUG in Oslo. It had a nice composition of 7 people and with a lot of interaction from the public they kept going for almost three hours.
Of course no one could really agree on what SOA was, but I think one of the most important things that came out of it is that SOA is often marketed as something that delivers what it still can’t. The promise of a flexible and reconfigurable system is certainly attractive, but it can’t deliver that today. What it can deliver is a way to integrate and orchestrate several services into new business processes. This is not something you let the business users change with point and click later on though.
It was also mentioned that SOA isn’t CRUD operations exposed as webservices. You might need to do it because of varying client technologies that require these operations, but I don’t think it’s something you could call SOA. Services are at a higher level, and I believe it is something you mainly construct at the edges of your system, not in the middle and for internal use.
An excellent event that should be repeated. Something as controversial as SOA rarely surface, so it might be a long time till next time. 😉