A short list of companies at the JavaOne Pavilion that look interesting to me:

Krugle is a source code search engine. It spiders your organizations source code repositories and lets you track code definitions. For instance, when you fix a bug in a well used, and shared, code library Krugle shows the other projects that use the same bug-laden code.

Style Intelligence has 101+ dashboards, reports, scorecards, and other visualizations of data.

Skyway Software makes an open-source application development environment. You build everything in their Eclipse plug-in. It's wonderfully well design user interface makes construction of apps very easy. I'm going to look into this one with the hope that I can build a bunch of sample code for PushToTest TestMaker users quickly.

Determyne is an open-source transaction-level performance monitoring solution for JEE applications. I'll be investigating this to incorporate into TestMaker.

-Frank

JavaOne 2008 struggles to retain its importance. Read my full report at:

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=49332

-Frank

Jeremy Geelan of Sys-Con interviewed me at the AjaxWorld conference last month. He asked me about trends I am seeing in Web 2.0 and Ajax development at enterprise IT shops. I also talk about what its like for software developers and testers to work in Ajax environments.

http://www.sys-con.tv/read/540772.htm

-Frank

I'll be giving a keynote talk on SOA Development In The Real World at TIBCO's user conference next week. This will be based on the work PushToTest did to surface the developer productivity and performance differences between TIBCO, BEA, Oracle, and IBM platforms for SOA development. All of the research is available under a free open-source license at http://soakit.pushtotest.com.

If you are attending TUCON then please let me know and I will be glad to meet with you personally.

-Frank

This week I was the speaker at SkillsMatter.com in London. I gave a talk on the PushToTest test methodology and free open-source test automation tools to check Web applications, Web services, and Ajax applications for function, scalability, and performance. SkillsMatter is the new European partner to PushToTest to offer training on our products. In June I am back in London teaching our popular Open-Source Test Automation Bootcamp.

Harry Wood attended my talk and posted a blog entry about his experience at http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/2008/04/11/unit-testing-soa-and-mule-talks

-Frank

Mule makes an open-source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and SOA development platform. Held at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco over 2 days, Mulecon attracted approximately 400 delegates, including Mule staff. I was very glad to go as the conference let me talk to several Mule ESB users. I had to do a fair amount of begging to get an invitation since PushToTest is the author of the SOA Knowledge Kit, a TIBCO commissioned comparison of commercial SOA/ESB development platforms. (PushToTest will be an exhibitor at TUCON later this month, and I might be in their keynote session.) Maybe someday I will be appointed an ambassador to something. :-)

The presentations varied between Mule staff talking about Mule and the product roadmap and customers talking about their use of Mule. The Mule staff seemed to be singing from the same songbook: Mule claims 13,000 deployments of Mule ESB, Mule 2.0 is not compatible with 1.4 but the migration should not be too difficult as the concepts are the same, Mule Enterprise Edition, Saturn and Mule HQ releases coming late this year.

A Room Full of Architects

It did not take long for me to realize that Mulecon delegates are mostly software architects. Typical questions I heard goes like this:

"Your company inherits a big bank and needs to decide between JMS and Advanced Message Queue Protocol (AMQP) for a universal protocol for your bank. Which would you pick?"

and

"How do you empirically come to a model that will let you uncover the performance characteristics and measurements?"

These are the kinds of discussions that make my wife immediately yawn and roll her eyes! Geeks, there's a lot of 'em in this room.

ESB, Grid, AMQP Approaches

Conversations about hub-and-spoke, virtual circuits, and bus architecture seem to be over. Just about everyone I met expects a heterogeneous architecture where parts of a system are hub-and-spoke and others are bus-based. Easy service interfaces now exist between each type of architecture using daemons and local brokers. Jahan Moreh, VP of Engineering at U1, had a very basic message "Provided the underlying products are good you won't have a problem."

Jahan was more sanguine about guaranteed deliver and performance. In essence "performance and guaranteed delivery are in conflict." Choose one but don't expect both. I very much want to do primary research to determine a standards way to profile performance in a guaranteed delivery setting. Hopefully one of our customers will commission a PushToTest study. (hint, hint.)

I learn about AMQP at Mulecon. AMQP is a protocol-level standards initiative to provide a messaging infrastructure. Jahan told me "AMQP tries to do something very important but may not be attainable. Because they are at the protocol level they may wind up being extensions on the side. I would bet on the JMS side."

POJOs Rule, But Where Is BPM?

Eugene Ciurana of LeapFrog gave a talk about LeapFrog's use of Mule. I just saw Eugene at TheServerSide.com Java Symposium in Las Vegas last week. Boy does Eugene get around!

LeapFrog is marketing a child's toy that features downloadable content – not bad for products that must cost less than a few dollars to manufacture! The backend system to support this effort uses ESB technology to provide flexibility to LeapFrog's software developers and reliability in operating the service and applications.

Many of the question-and-answer sessions at Mulecon include a question on Business Process Management (BPM) such as: "What are you doing for BPM in your architecture?" Eugene took one of these.

This question echoes what I had learned in Las Vegas: Java architects and developers are frustrated looking for Business Process Management (BPM) standards and tools. Brian Sletten's talk at TSSJS was titled "Avoiding ESBs" but could have been better described as "I'm sick and tired of waiting for vendors to give me a decent Business Process Management (BPM) platform!"

At Mulecon, Rory dela Pax of Biogen Idec, told me that "Mule is good at doing some workflow. But, all of us are struggling with BPM. We do a separation of skills strategy rather than overloading the ESB with these tasks."

Over the years I have seen most of the platform vendors try to provide the Java development community with set of products, best practices, framework, and code to implement applications that deliver business flows. I am specifically remembering the failures of JBI, JEMs, BPEL, SCA, and WS-*. None have come together to offer a standard. I sense a lot of anger and disappointment at all the failed attempts. Mostly disappointment from me.

Eugene answered the BPM question by telling the delegates that LeapFrog pushes all of its development to Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs.) They actively separate every application from each other. LeapFrog then uses Mule routers to define the inputs and outputs. Eugene said "We are not doing any transactional data at Leapfrog. Our support is for the toy devices." He added that Leapfrog has a separate side of the IT house for Oracle tools and BPEL.

Mule and Clustering

Rory dela Pax of Biogen Idec gave a brief talk on their migration from BEA WebLogic Integration (WLI) to Mule. The migration came about like many companies adopting an open-source project: A developer mentioned it during a water break conversation. The environment was ripe: Biogen Idec found WLI to be "a bit on the heavy side, unstable, and has not scaled well." They were also leery of the rumors of the Oracle buy-out since late 2006. They found that Mule has a one-for-one match in capabilities, plus they see Mule as lightweight, stable, and scalable.

I can understand lightweight and stable, but the scalability claim seemed to need some proof. Rory tells me they achieve scalability by using WebLogic Server (WLS) 8.1 SP6's clustering. They deploy their Mule application as a WAR file in a cluster of JVMs in WLS. There are no separate JVMs in their environment. I imagine the gaul the WLI product manager must feel at being swapped out. :-)

Still, there is a lot that Biogen Idec needs to learn about clustering. They still need to define the best way to cluster. Rory told the delegates "We don't know how to do that." They would like to define clustering methods in environments where message sizes grow larger. Right now their application uses simple verb+link combinations. The incoming request is to approve an invoice and the response contains a link to bring the user's browser into the application.

Rory told me some of the downsides to using this WLS clustering approach. For example, they use Quartz as a scheduler. In this WLS clustering set-up changing the Quartz schedules means redeploying the application to the cluster.

Moving Up To Mule 2.0

Mule 1.4 uses DTDs to define pretty much everything – settings, configuration, deployments. Mule 2.0 delivers XML Schema based configuration that leverages Spring's "Extensible XML Authoring." The result is less cumbersome class names because of namespace support. They are updating their Eclipse support to provide auto-completion and context-specific help. Mule 2.0 features transport-specific endpoints and connectors and now everything is done through typed properties. There is a lot of extensibility because each module/transport comes with its own schema. Mule 2.0 lets you implemtn your own schema too.

Some additional changes in Mule 2.0: CXF supercedes XFire (XFire is still available,) there is a new expression evaluator framework, streaming improvements, auto-transformation, and lots of bug fixes. Plus, Mule 2.0 has 30% more unit tests over 1.4. Mule uses Spring to implement Beans. Mule uses session and entity (data) beans inside the Mule container or through proxies to external data services.

Mulecon left me a few questions:

1. How important was the Spring-based approach to building services to Mule's popularity and success?
2. Is anyone, I mean anyone on Earth, using OpenESB from Sun? None of the Mule users had any experience with it.
3. How are Mule and Mule users testing Mule for scalability and performance? Mule 2 provides hundreds of unit tests but apparently no performance tests, at least none that I could find.
4. What are the tradeoffs of an ESB versus Gigispaces, Tangosol and other grid environments?

Mulecon impressed me with its quality presentations and delegates. I will keep it in mind when PushToTest does its first user conference, PTTCon, or PushCon, of TestCon, or who knows!?

-Frank

We've been making very good progress in building TestMaker 5.2. I'm feeling like a proud father and want to show off my child's cleverness. In TestMaker 5 we introduced a new system of ScriptRunners. This is an extensible facility to operating externally created functional unit tests within a PushToTest TestMaker test. We bundled Eviware soapUI and SpikeSource TestGen4Web with TestMaker and provided ScriptRunners for each. As a result of the latest work TestMaker tests share data between ScriptRunners through a Data Production Library (DPL.) For instance, a functional test first makes a SOAP-based Web service request to learn product information codes and then makes a Web application (HTTP) request to make sure customers are finding the products.



PushToTest orchestrates a Functional test by defining the operating parameters and use cases in a TestScenario document in XML format, as illustrated above.

The test identifies a PushToTest Data Production Library (DPL) that will be the exchange medium between the soapUI TestCase and the TestGen4Web recorded test. The soapUI TestCase reads the data value for the SOAP request from a Properties file in the soapUI project. The soapUI TestCase receives the SOAP response and saves the response parameter to the DPL.

The TestScenario instructs PushToTest to then run the recorded TestGen4Web unit test. The test uses the DPL data from the soapUI test to make an HTTP Get request to the Web host. That concludes the functional test.

I am happy to make the above example available for immediate free download at http://downloads.pushtotest.com/tm5/EndToEndTestExample.zip

You will need the latest TestMaker 5.2 (pre-alpha) version to operate the example. See the faq for instructions on getting the code.

Enjoy.

-Frank

The session is free and I will be happy to answer your questions. For details and directions

see: http://www.skillsmatter.com/event/java-jee/the-next-step-in-unit-testing-and-java

Over the past year PushToTest observed a trend among the 160,000 people in our open-source community: Software developers, QA testers, and IT managers are looking for a better way to develop, orchestrate, deploy, and manage services. The Composition Approach to Building Large-Scale SOA introduces a new service composition approach to building SOA services, explains composition, and provides a methodology and test kit to evaluate today's tools for developer productivity and ease of deployment/management.

Last week, TIBCO hosted me on a Webcast to talk about Service Virtualization, Service Composition, and the SOA Knowledge Kit. The Webcast is now available at:

http://media.tibco.com/video/tibco_031808/index.html

 

-Frank

PushToTest version 5.2 (which should be out this Spring) will feature Selenium integrated into the PushToTest test automation platform. See http://bugs.pushtotest.com/ticket/136 for details.) Selenium users will create functional tests of Web and Ajax applications using the Selenium plug-in to MS Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, and other browsers. PushToTest users have two choices to run Selenium tests in the PushToTest test automation environment:

1) PushToTest 5.2 will include a Selenium test runner. This runner instantiates a Web browser in a TestNode (our distributed test environment,) operates the Selenium test, and reports the results. This is a powerful choice to run Selenium tests as functional and regression tests, and business service monitors.

2) PushToTest 5.2 includes a Selenium-to-Java and Selenium-to-Jython transformation utility. The utility creates a Java class (or Jython script) that implements the test steps using the HTMLUnit framework. HTMLUnit acts like a browser, including operating Ajax applications using Rhino (the JavaScript engine from the Apache Mozilla/Firefox browsers.) The is a powerful choice to run Selenium tests as load and performance tests.

For both of the above options, Selenium tests receive dynamic operational data at runtime from PushToTest Data Production Libraries (DPLs.) For instance, a Selenium test that operates a sign-in page receives the account number and password from a DPL that accesses data from a comma-separated-value file (or a relational database or custom DPL.)

Additionally, Selenium tests produce results data that PushToTest Results Analysis engine renders into hundreds of charts. And, these charts correlate Selenium test operation to resource utilization (CPU, Network, Memory, Threads) in the back-end server.

We have an "alpha" quality version of the Selenium-to-Jython transformation utility to give to you today. This is from a contribution from Dominique and Olivier at Denali. All you need to do is ask.

-Frank

This morning I am glad to introduce you to a new set of resources to help surface scalability and performance issues in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA.) The SOA Knowledge and Performance Kit is a free open-source resource to show you what it really takes to build services using today's leading SOA development platforms.

The Kit delivers an SOA use case design, source code to the implementations of the use case on Oracle, IBM, BEA, and TIBCO platforms, developer journals describing our experiences step-by-step, a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator, and performance and scalability tests that leverage the PushToTest test automation platform.

PushToTest looked below the surface-level marketing claims to understand the skill sets, domain expertise, and specialization that it takes to be successful. We discovered a wide variety of experiences: some highly successful and others rife with challenges. We measured the amount of developer effort to implement an SOA use case and summarize the findings in the following total cost of ownership (TCO) comparison chart.

This morning we opened the doors on a new center within the PushToTest Web site for you to learn more about SOA, learn about the new composition approach to SOA development and deployment, and download the kits.

SOA Knowledge and Performance Kit

-Frank

Last year PushToTest built a test runner for soapUI and bundled soapUI in the PushToTest version 5 distribution. The advantage to Java developers is three fold:

1) soapUI test suites run in a distributed PushToTest test environment - a grid of test machines each turning out SOAP requests to your application.

2) The PushToTest environment dynamically provides operational data to the soapUI test suites. For instance, the data could be sign-in information or product part numbers. The data production libraries (DPLs) get data from a relational database, from a comma-separated-value file, and from service calls dynamically.

3) PushToTest provides a results analysis engine and performance comparison utility to identify problem test suite performance and problem service calls. Additionally, while the test suites operate the PushToTest Monitor watches CPU, Network, and Memory utilization of the test machines and the target hosting the application and correlates these back to the test suite operation to surface the problem datacenter components.

We increasingly see upper management at our customers look at consumer hits like Facebook, Flikr, Google Maps, and tell their engineers "We want that!" At the same time Java developers in 2008 have good tools to service enable their classes. The interface may be SOAP, or any number of others including REST, Ajax, JMS to a message queue, RMI, etc.

We are seeing customers use PushToTest in service environments. They tend to start service enabling a few classes and wind-up with a grid of interconnected services. While soapUI by itself is a terrific tool for working with individual services, the nature of service enabling Java classes means most organizations need a test methodology, patterns, and tools that work in a grid of services.

Customer success at testing in a grid environment is the motivation behind a new partnership that eviware and PushToTest announced this week. Java developers benefit when two open-source 100% Java projects partner to solve service testing challenges and help us test in a grid environment.

-Frank

We are getting very close to the PushToTest 5.1 release - hopefully this week! New datasheet and white paper downloads are available to explain PushToTest and open-source test automation:

PushToTest 2-Page DataSheet

PushToTest White Paper: The Importance of Test Automation

Both are in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format.

-Frank

Every once in a while a confluence of ideas happens around open-source test automation. The confluence of this week is:

• Apache's announcement of Jackrabbit 1.4
• Zephyr's announcement that their private beta of a new collaborative test automation platform uses Jackrabbit
• Jimmy Foulkes (one of our architects) push for PTTWeb to use JSR 170 and specifically Jackrabbit as our new repository for the upcoming PushToTest collaborative test automation platform.

All of these happened this week!

PushToTest is being used by hundreds of thousands of developers now. We often hear users and customers asking for a collaborative test environment that features a repository of tests and a scheduler. We are working on these under the codename PTTWeb. The first piece of the project is the repository.

This is perhaps the most important module of PTTWeb because it provides all the storage functionality required by the other modules. Will serve as the storage repository for test scenarios, resources and scripts as well as test results.

In general this will include the storage of the following areas:

• Test resources: test related artifacts using a file system metaphor
• Test results: all test data results associated to the executed jobs from the different test nodes
• Security: all information related to security access like users, roles, permissions, etc.
• Scheduling: job and its execution scheduling information

In order to avoid spending time on writing code to provide this functionality it is necessary to find an Open Source product/project that provides this service. The Java Community process has a specification for Content Repositories under the JSR 170. There are several Open Source implementations of this JSR. One possible implementation is the Apache Jackrabbit project that fulfills this JSR as well as adding several more features of its own. Jackrabbit is in use by several important projects like JBoss portal, Magnolia Content management system, jLibrary, Sun's OpenPortal Project.

Most providers for this JSR can provide RDMS implementation for the underlying data store. A MySql database could provide the actual storage capabilities for the repository although a file system based repository is much faster. The idea is that the repository should emulate a typical hierarchical file system with similar access permission typical of a file system. Attention will be placed in the design to the appropriate structure of this repository and to allow the definition of the required metadata associated with the possible resources to be kept there.

A general search function will be provided on this repository. For those resources of text type the actual contents of the resource can be searched, otherwise the search will be performed on the actual names, attributes and repository structure for the repository.

The design document for PTTWeb is available for your review, feedback and ideas here.

-Frank

I am happy to report that TestMaker 5.1 is available for immediate download at http://www.pushtotest.com. The new version fixes many bugs and delivers useful enhancements.

We are making this Release Candidate available to get user feedback on the changes. I anticipate we will make 2 additional release candidates to solve bugs and make additional improvements. We will be using http://bugs.pushtotest.com to track the changes.

Thank you to everyone that participated in this release!

-Frank

--

TestMaker 5.1 Changes

• TestMaker 5.0 ships with TestGen4Web 0.49 that fails to install on Firefox 2.0.0.7 or later. TestMaker now ships with TestGen4Web 0.50.2-PTT to be fully compatible with Firefox 2.0.0.7 and later.
• TestMaker 5.1 changes the way TestGen4Web scripts are run in the TestNode environment. The new script runner uses TestGen4Web's htmlunit-interpreter package. This improves TestMaker's ability to natively run TestGen4Web recorded unit tests.
• TestMaker 5.1 offers many minor improvements and bug fixes to the results and reporting capabilities. The charts for a load test now include a legend of concurrent user (CR) levels. We fixed an issue where load tests greater than 12 hours show negative horizontal axis values in the resource distribution charts. We removed the load test summary report from the output panel. We added new options to the TestScenario definition for a load test to automatically save all charts to the results directory and create an HTML-based summary report.
• We fixed many problems with installing and running TestMaker on Mac OS X, including an installation problem that prevented the Resource Monitor (PTTMonitor) from running.
• We updated the documention by correcting many spelling and grammer problems and including new sections for QA Testers and IT management. Additionally, we added new documentation to show the options to log results data directly to a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS)and added documentation to show how to set TestMaker and TestNode memory settings.
• We did an overhaul of the TestMaker classpath and supporting Java Archive Resource (JAR) files.
• TestMaker runs on Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server, and Windows Vista. TestMaker 5.1 and later is no longer compatible with the old Windows 2000 and NT operating environments because of a bug in Windows that limits the size of a classpath.
• TestMaker 5.0 shipped with a typo in the element in a TestScenario. The element was incorrectly named (notice the extra s.) TestMaker 5.1 accepts the correct and incorrect versions.
• Added the File menu -> Open Scenario command to open TestScenarios.
• Added new capability to TestScenarios to control timeout values for usecases (unit tests) that take too long to operate.
• Added an option for the transaction distribution charts to use a moving data average instead of inserting every data point.

A complete list of changes and their associated bug reports is found at: http://www.pushtotest.com/Docs/vreleasenotes

While WSDL is often derided for being simply awful, it does provide developers with a standards-based programmatic way to know how to invoke services. The Java developer community is finally seeing some advancement in the tools to work with WSDL. For instance, it is possible to look at a WSDL document and compare it to the unit tests of the services. The comparison shows the amount of test coverage a developer has on the deployed services.

Some tools such as Eviware's soapUI 2.0 are delivering code coverage estimates while developers use the tool to build test suites. Other tools like BEA WebLogic Workshop 10.3 (now in preview release) are focusing on graphic utilities to work with WSDL.

Maybe these tools will extend SOAP-based Web service viability as a universal remoting capability for a little while longer. If it isn't SOAP and WSDL, then what is it? REST, XML-RPC, FastInfoset, what?

-Frank

Last week PushToTest hosted the first of a new series of 2-Day Hands-On seminars on Test Automation. The event sold out and the room was packed with eager students. Some traveled from Michigan to the seminar in Silicon Valley, California.

Here are some of my notes from the seminar:

1) The students at the seminar were from a rich cross section of backgrounds and experiences. We had software architects, software developers, QA testers, database administrators, and project managers. This shows me that test automation is a multi-discipline effort. It is not enough anymore to throw testing over the wall to a bunch of testers and not worry about the results.

2) TestMaker is in better shape that I had thought. In the days that lead up to the seminar I was concerned that the usability in TestMaker would make the hands-on portions difficult to follow. I was happy to none of the students ran into any roadblocks that kept them from completed the workbook of tasks. (This is not to say that we can put off usability improvements in TestMaker. Usability is a big issue in my eyes.)

3) The students universally told me they are not finding commercial test automation tools that are appropriate for Web application, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA,) Ajax, Web service, and Web 2.0 testing. As a result they often have one tool for Web application testing and another tool for Ajax testing.

4) Many students liked the informal style of the presentations. They were looking to gain an understanding of testing in the 21st century and take home tactics and methodology they will use in their own environment.

5) Several of the students are working in SOA environments and were interested to learn about TestMaker integration with registry/repository products. See here for details

The next seminar events are in London, New York, and then back in Silicon Valley. For details check http://www.pushtotest.com/Docs/training/seminarform.

-Frank

BEA announced WebLogic Server 10.3 Tech Preview is now available.

http://commerce.bea.com/products/weblogicplatform/weblogic_prod_fam.jsp

Here is my take on WLS 10.3 preview:

"Lightweight" Server - They reduced the footprint to make it a smaller download. The new version strips out Workshop IDE, various JVMs, Upgrade Wizards, Database Drivers, and the console optional. The installer downloads these optional items as the user determines.

Iterative Development and faster startup - BEA is finally making it easier and faster to do iterative development - where you make changes in your code and redeploy over-and-over quickly. In my opinion JBoss owes a large part of its early success to delivering iterative development to developers.

Web Service stack - WLS 10.3 comes with a new SOAP stack for JAX-RPC (J2EE 1.4) and JAX-WS (Java EE 5) Web Services.

SCA Support - Still in the "coming soon" category. SCA should be a good alternative (to EJBs) deployment description language for services running on WLS. BEA is still working on how they will package SCA support.

Spring 2.0.2 now, 2.1 by GA

Java 6 support, finally!

Dojo client support with a publish/subscribe mechanism. It sounds a lot like DWR

C# JMS client - Enables .NET applications to be a client to the BEA JMS message bus, including persistent messaging.

SAML 2.0 support (new) and an update to SAML 1.1 for Web-based security.

Seems like a good minor upgrade to a good application server.

-Frank

This morning I received a message from TechTarget telling me that SearchWebServices.com is renaming itself to SearchSOA.com. According to TechTarget the move is in line with a shift of attitudes and efforts within the application development community.

As I've written many times, SOA is not Web Services. This move is a signal that application developers are voting with their feet.

I wish TechTarget well.

-Frank

---

Email from Mark Walter of TechTarget:

In 2001, the application development community was focused on web services. The buzz was all around SOAP-based inter-application connections, and best practices for designing an optimal underlying architecture were largely viewed as an afterthought.

Since then, we've seen the market shift considerably. Service-oriented architecture is a top-of-mind concern for IT architects and managers. In fact, a recent survey of more than 280 SearchWebservices.com members revealed that 82% of respondents labeled SOA an important priority in their organization, with 56% highlighting it as very or extremely important.

SearchWebServices.com has been on the forefront of the paradigm shift. In the last 24 months, we've expanded coverage beyond one-off web services projects to focus on the greater picture of SOA. Our editorial content provides insight into all the key areas of SOA, including business process management, SOA governance, data integration, and more. The site's prestige in the community is recognized by leading experts who regularly contribute tips and articles, including David Linthicum, Managing Partner at Zapthink; and Anne Thomas Manes, VP and Research Director of the Burton Group. And over 160,000 unique visitors turn to SearchWebservices.com each month to learn practical, hands-on advice; industry best practices; and real-world examples that they can use for their current and future SOA projects.

In an effort to better reflect the breadth and scope of our editorial mission, I'm proud to announce that beginning October 18th, SearchWebServices.com will now be SearchSOA.com. We believe this is an important step in fulfilling our role as the number one source for SOA resources and information. SearchSOA.com will focus on continuing to educate architects, IT and application development managers, software project managers, senior IT executives, business analysts and enterprise architects on the key happenings in this rapidly expanding space, and to provide them with even more valuable insight into how to successfully implement the concepts that comprise SOA.

As part of this shift in our site strategy, the SearchSOA.com team will focus on bringing our advertisers even more SOA-focused sponsorship opportunities in 2008. Among the first programs we're excited to announce is the Pragmatic SOA Governance seminar, a day-long event scheduled for three cities in February 2008. The seminars series will give you an opportunity to engage with a pre-qualified, invite-only audience of more than 80 to 100 senior architects, IT managers, directors/VPs and C-level executives per city that have purchase influence over SOA-related products and services and are currently involved or actively planning an SOA project. As a compliment to this seminar series, SearchSOA.com will host our first virtual seminar dedicated entirely to SOA Governance in March 2008. Please don't hesitate to contact your TechTarget account executive for additional details.

On behalf of the SearchSOA.com team, I look forward to partnering with you in facilitating community knowledge and steering enterprise SOA adoption and implementation.

Best Regards, Mark Walter, VP & Publisher Application Development Media Group

Here's a shameless plug for my keynote at the STARWest Conference. It's an audio podcast interview.

-Frank