IBM

I gave a talk at the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit  today. I discussed the service virtualization and service composition trends we see in the PushToTest open-source community. Service virtualization is an effort to make deployment and operation of software easier. Development tools supporting service virtualization add deployment code to your software. The resulting objects run on a grid of servers and in multiple datacenters. Development tools supporting service composition provide a visual map of the interdependencies between services. Composition helps the a software developer joining a team to get up to speed on how the software "hangs together."

We did primary research on SOA development solutions from TIBCO, Oracle, IBM, and BEA to uncover the developer productivity issues baked into these tools. The results were interesting and suprising.

The slides are available for free download at:
http://downloads.pushtotest.com/200806/SOAComposition-Gartner2008.pdf

-Frank

We provide a free SOA Knowledge and Performance Kit to let enterprise managers understand the developer productivity and performance differences between commercial SOA development and deployment platforms, including TIBCO, IBM, Oracle, and BEA. We dinged IBM for its huge download requirements to get their development platform installed on our equipment. Before you can write your first service, IBM requires you to download WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Integration Developer, and Rational Application Developer. That's almost half a terrabyte of downloads.

Aaron Miller of IBM contacted me today to let me know that IBM is hosting an SOA Sandbox. The Sandbox uses Cytrix sessions to provide remote access to an operating environment where WebSphere is already installed, configured, and tuned. IBM offers the Sandbox through the developerWorks program, so its free. They even let you save a slice of the environment for ressurection later. The SOA Sandbox is a great resource for developers. Details are at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/soasandbox.

-Frank