First impressions about OOP 2008 / Munich ICM

My conference programme suffered some amendments.

• Model driven development for embedded systems with Eclipse
• SOA@T-Mobile
• Common Sense over Conservatism – is Ruby on Rails ready for the enterprise?
• MDSD und SOA und BPM – how does it match?
• Model driven product line engineering
• Spring or EJB 3.0 - two light weights in comparison
• REST: the architecture of the Web as a basis for SOA
• Case Study: The New Guardian.co.uk
• ++Panel: what comes after SOA?
• --Spring Framework in the wold of Java 6 and Java EE 5
• ++OSGi: Universal Middleware
• --What's next about Java? – Enhancements in Java 7.0
• Building and consuming RESTful JSON services with Apache CXF and Google Web Toolkit
• Better software due to AOP
• Java multi threading with multi core CPUs

Just to summarize my first impressions in a couple of words, I would say the conference was a bit lengthy, too long breaks at the expense of lectures, few really new things. Though it did not meet my expectations, I have extracted some new ideas and fresh thoughts for my work and really eager to dig deeper on several topics. Some lectures were very impressive, informative and entertaining. During some of them, to my deep regret, I had to struggle hard not to fall asleep - and I was not alone facing this problem. I'll write a couple of words to each of the lectures I attended in the next post very soon.

Go to OOP 2008 for new sources of inspiration

One of the most important annual IT congresses in Germany OOP 2008 is up coming, taking place in Munich from 21th to 25th of January. SOA will be one of the main topics there, as it is over last 3 years. I'm just very curious, because of several sessions about SOA in regard to real SOA projects and the first fruits they have brought. For instance, a session with Bernd Semmerau and his colleges concerning implementation of an SOA solution at T-Mobile. Let's see what T-Mobile guys think of SOA. Is it hit or hype? Use cases like some company implemented a new web services solution is not very convincing to me. I expect from SOA much more than just a usage of new programming techniques.

The longer I have to do with it, the more I get convinced , that SOA main challenge is neither the infrastructure nor to get the techniques working. Much more challenging is that magic and fearsome word GOVERNANCE, that makes me shiver when I think of a wide adoption of SOA in a really big enterprise. It's more about organisation of processes, decision making about emerging services, to hold the development and maintenance process under control. It's just incredibly complex. I personally do not believe software vendors supporting SOA, which sometimes decrease the importance of it, promising that their products solve all possible and impossible problems. I think I'm not alone with my deliberations and maybe T-Mobile guys have the answers on these worrying questions.

Here is what I'm going to undertake during the congress (besides of having fun to meet the gurus):

• Model driven development for embedded systems with Eclipse
• SOA@T-Mobile
• Common Sense over Conservatism – is Ruby on Rails ready for the enterprise?
• MDSD und SOA und BPM – how does it match?
• Model driven product line engineering
• Spring or EJB 3.0 - two light weights in comparison
• REST: the architecture of the Web as a basis for SOA
• Case Study: The New Guardian.co.uk
• Spring Framework in the wold of Java 6 and Java EE 5
• What's next about Java? – Enhancements in Java 7.0
• Building and consuming RESTful JSON services with Apache CXF and Google Web Toolkit
• Better software due to AOP
• Java multi threading with multi core CPUs

I'll give a feedback as soon as I'm back again.

IBM SOA certification completed

I accomplished my Architectural Design of SOA Solutions certification program and cleared my exam, proudly holding the IBM Certified SOA Solution Designer title now.

I started my preparation in February this year going deeper into details and studying more intensively closer to the exam.

At first I wanted to find a vendor independent SOA certification with the primary goal not even to get certified by to learn how to build SOA compliant solutions and to apply the knowledge gained while studying in the right way. Unfortunately there was only one vendor unspecific SOA certification of OASIS in a development stage. So after taking a glance at the IBM preparation material, I chose it, because it contained really little hints to IBM products and told more about SOA standards, design principles and benefits of this technology.

Here are some considerations as to meaningfulness of SOA certification at all that helped me to convince myself of the rightfulness of my decision: Should We Promote SOA Certification?

If someone is interested in pursuing the SOA certification from IBM or just curious about IBM's vision of it, here is a group, where these specific issues are discussed:

ibmsoacert : IBM SOA CERTIFICATION

Participating in this group helped me very much on my way to the certification. Thank you guys for your help, opinions and critical thoughts !

And the link to the IBM site concerning this certification: Test 665: Architectural Design of SOA Solutions

IBM SOA certification

I'm preparing for IBM SOA solution designer certification now and am a bit limited in time to post here. Certification is an interesting topic here. I have heard very different opinions to this issue. Some say "how can you get certified a way of thinking" referring to SOA. I still believe it is an architectural style or architecture pattern as IBM defines it. And thus the knowledge to apply it can be measured and certified.

I should say, pursuing this IBM certification I learned a whole bunch new things about SOA. Regardless of the fact that the provider is IBM the preparation material is to 90% vendor unspecific and has a good abstraction level. There is also an assessment test from IBM at IBM education portal , which costs only 10$ and helped me to verify my level of knowledge. At my first attempt, before studying deeply, I scored it with 52% which meant failed (and study). I have repeated the test today after accomplishing two educational sections from IBM and digging through a lot of literature. The second attempt was 72%, which means passed (and study further :-)

ESB-CON III: Enabling Business-Critical Integration and SOA

ESB-CON online conference is taking place today.
Here are the highlights:

· ESB-CON Keynote Panel (with execs from IBM, BEA, Progress and Oracle)
· IBM Solo Presentation
· BEA Systems Solo Presentation
· Progress Software Solo Presentation
· Oracle Corp. Solo Presentation

and a registration link
It might be very informative with regard to the participants

Enterprise Service Bus vendors comparison

I've run into an interesting article about Enterprise Service Bus.

Enterprise service buses hit the road: http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/07/22/30FEesb_1.html

It might be a bit outdated as of July 22, 2005, but still an interesting comparison between different ESB vendors.

SOA on the CEBIT 2007 in Hannover

I'm going to visit CEBIT in Hannover this year. One of the aspects I would like to get informed about is SOA. And SOA is a highlight topic on the exhibition this year with numerous events and presented solutions. So I started to look for appropriate exhibitors to plan my visit. IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Software AG are already on my list. Surprisingly I could not find BEA with its AuquaLogic Suite and TIBCO among the exhibitors. Though there are lot of smaller companies representing SOA sector that go to CEBIT, most of them offering consulting services.

Launching an SOA initiative with the right vendor?

According to the recent Gartner researches 80 percent of IT initiatives will be service-oriented by the end of 2007. By current variety of vendors and solutions, I 'm just asking myself what would be the most promising product for registry, repository, testing, validation and policy management? Any practical experiences at this point? Both failures and success stories would be interesting to know.