WebMethods makes another SOA buy
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Business integration suite vendor WebMethods is on the acquisition trail again, this time looking to pick up expertise in SOA (service-oriented architecture) governance through the planned purchase of Infravio.
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Finally a use for BEA It's a head-scratcher of a deal. Two big names in the same market with overlapping offerings. Surely the only justification for spending so much money is to buy customers to leapfrog the industry number one.â¦
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Software AG has bought the application modernization activities of Jacada, adding to its portfolio of tools for prolonging the life of mainframe applications by giving them a Web interface.The sale marks Jacada&#39;s move out of the application modernization and middleware software business in order to concentrate on development of call center systems.Software AG has bought the rights to Jacada&#39;s Terminal Emulator, Interface Server, and HostFuse products, among others. Jacada keeps its WorkSpace and WinFuse software, and rights to the Jacada brand.Eight of Jacada&#39;s research, development and support staff will join Software AG to maintain the application modernization products.Software AG will pay $26 million in cash for the business, which generates $12 million in annual revenue, it said Thursday.It will gain access to 200 of Jacada&#39;s 1,200 customers, mostly in the U.S., giving it a chance to expand its SOA (services-oriented architecture) work in an important market, it said.The deal is tiny compared to&#160;Software AG&#39;s purchase of U.S. software vendor webMethods: It paid $546 million for the SOA and business process management (BPM) company in June.Software AG is also looking to acquire other smaller companies or business units which could benefit from its global infrastructure. Earlier this year it paid $62 million for 80 percent of its Israeli distributor SPL Software.Also on Thursday, Jacada announced the appointment of a new CEO, Paul O&#39;Callaghan, from Jan. 1. President of the company since May 2006, he replaces Gideon Hollander, who will remain with the company as chairman.&#160;
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Blog: eBay takes the top spot as a Web services provider although Microsoft continues to maintain developer loyalty.
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As the number of Web services specifications proliferates, some developers advocate a return to a simpler approach.
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Deepening its commitment to help corporate users create SOAs (service-oriented architectures) through the use of Web services, IBM's Global Services unit on Thursday announced the formation of an SOA Management Practice.
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CompaniesÂ Web services orchestration platforms share linkage through Collaxa
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The Eclipse Foundation is developing an open source SOA framework intended for applications ranging from enterprise environments to embedded systems.
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InfoWorld - The Eclipse Foundation with its Swordfish project is developing an open source SOA framework intended for applications ranging from enterprise environments to embedded systems.
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With open-source software being formally introduced Monday, WSO2 seeks to bridge the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails Web framework with the SOA and Web services spaces.The company is set to debut WSO2 WSF/Ruby (Web Services Framework for Ruby) 1.0, providing a Ruby extension to support the Web Services WS-* stack. Ruby developers can incorporate security and reliable messaging capabilities needed for trusted, enterprise-class SOAP-based Web services, WSO2 said. But the product also supports the alternative REST (Representational State Transfer) Web services."Ruby, as you know, has become a very popular language the last few years, and what we are enabling is for Ruby to become part of an enterprise SOA architecture," WSO Chairman/CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana said.While Ruby has been popular in the Web 2.0 realm, sometimes it needs to talk to legacy architectures, he said. With the new framework, developers could build a Web application using Ruby and then hook into enterprise infrastructures, such as JMS (Java Message Service) queues. For example, a Web site might be built with Ruby that then needs to link to an order fulfillment system based on an IBM mainframe or minicomputer, Weerawarana said.With the December release of Ruby on Rails 2.0, the builders of Rails swapped out a SOAP library and replaced it with REST capabilities. In doing this, David Heinemeier Hansson, the founder of Rails, stressed that that SOAP and its attendant WS-* stack had become too complex.But Weerawarana stressed REST may not always be sufficient. "[The REST preference] is a perfectly fine position to take if you don't need any kind of these security and reliability infrastructure [capabilities]," he said. WSO2's framework would replace the SOAP capabilities removed in Rails 2.0, he said.Weerawarana's stance was seconded by a user of the company's products, Stefan Tilkov, CEO of infoQ, a consulting firm near Dusseldorf, Germany. While saying he likes Rails because it picks and chooses technologies, such as opting for REST over SOAP, Tilkov said businesses may not be ready to welcome Rails and the lesser known REST Web services at the same time, he said."Sometimes, you have to decide whether you want to fight all of the possible battles at once. Trying to introduce both Rails and [REST] at the same to a company can really be a challenge," he said. WSO2 is providing WS-* and SOAP capabilities for Rails, Tilkov stressed.Still, Tilkov likes REST. "I'm a very big REST fan, and I [advocate] the use of REST whenever I can," he said.WSF/Ruby 1.0 binds WSO2's Web Services Framework for C into Ruby to provide an extension based on three Apache projects. These include: Axis 2C, which is a Web services runtime to support REST and SOA; Sandesha/C, supporting WS-Reliable Messaging; and Rampart/C, for WS-Security capabilities.Also, WSF/Ruby 1.0 uses Ruby on Rails as its deployment model for providing services.Client and service APIs are offered. Support is featured for SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2. The software is interoperable with Microsoft .Net, the WS02 Web Services Application Server, and other J2EE implementations. SOAP Message Transmission Optmization and WS-Addressing capabilities are included as well.Downloadable here, WSF/Ruby 1.0 is offered under the Apache License 2.0. While it is free, WS02 does sell development and production services as well as training for it. Production support prices start at $2,000, while development support begins at $2,500 for 10 hours. Training costs $400 per day per person with a minimum of five persons required.WSO2's long-term strategy includes allowing scripting languages like Ruby, Perl, and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) to participate in an enterprise SOA.
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WebMethods Inc., a Fairfax business software company, said it will have to restate its 2004 financial results by about $5 million because of improper transactions and accounting activities by employees of its Japanese subsidiary.
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Work hard for the money IBM today rolled out 23 updated product and 11 professional services offerings for service oriented architectures (SOAs). Some use technology from recent and recent-ish acquisitions, Webify, BuildForge and Bowstreet.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems this week offered a rare glimpse of its upcoming SOA (service-oriented architecture) tool set, called WorkSpace 360, with a demonstration of a prototype tool currently under development. "We're moving towards having the ability to do metadata-driven development," said Bill Roth, vice president of BEA's Workshop Business Unit, during an interview in Singapore. In the future, developers will spend most of their time creating metadata that describes the application and how it behaves, "rather than a bunch of sentences that end with semicolons," he said. "There will always be the need to write code, there will always be the need to do the lower-level stuff. But I think we can do better," Roth said. The heart of WorkSpace 360 is called WorkSpace Central, a set of tools designed for developing and managing applications built usingÂ BEA's upcoming SOA 360 platform. Scheduled to be introduced starting next year, WorkSpace 360 is designed to bring business analysts, architects, developers and IT operations executives together in a shared workspace. WorkSpace 360 will cover BEA's entire product lineup, including a mix of rich-client tools based on Eclipse and Web-based versions. "It starts potentially with AquaLogic and leveraging AquaLogic business-process management. There then will be a piece which we've previously called AquaLogic Composer, which will evolve into a bunch of tools, including a service assembly modeller," Roth said. The service assembly modeller, which is based on the SCA (Service Component Architecture) specification developed by BEA and IBM, gives users a view of how different services are connected and how they communicate, Roth said. The service assembly modeller can scan a set of services available from a registry or a data-services platform and display the connections that exist between them. The result, as demonstrated using a prototype of the tool on Roth's laptop, is a flow chart of available services, including SCA notations for each service. "What you'll be able to do ultimately is [click the] right mouse button on the links and annotate them," Roth said, noting these annotations will be saved to the metadata repository. Developers and other team members will then be able to access the annotations, he said. The service assembly modeller and other WorkSpace 360 tools are expected to be available during the first half of 2007. "Maybe sooner," Roth said.
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WSO2 is offering its open-source WSO2 Mashup Server product, which leverages JavaScript and Web services in assembling mashups, on Monday. In positioning the product for use by JavaScript developers, the company is looking to enable delivery of more functional mashups than can be built with alternative GUI-based tools. A hosted online version of Mashup Server, called Mooshup.com, also will be launched Monday as a community site for developing and sharing mashups.With WSO2 Mashup Server 1.0, WSO2 anticipates a confluence of Web 2.0 social capabilities and enterprise needs. "Basically, what we believe is that enterprise IT is going to go more toward a social enterprise structure where the IT offerings are not only by IT staff but by anybody in the enterprise," said WSO2 Chairman/CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana.But WSO2 is targeting Web developers who can write JavaScript. "The main purpose of WSO2 Mashup Server is to allow developers to author new Web services in JavaScript," said Jonathan Marsh, WSO2 director of mashup technologies. These Web services can be consumed within other enterprise tools and exposed as an RSS or Atom feed, he said.WSO's mashup platform is not intended to complete head-to-head with more GUI-based business level mashup products. "There's a feeling that we had that limiting yourself to a GUI right off the bat gets you started very quickly, but you quickly reach walls that block you from doing precisely what you'd like to do," Marsh said. Eventually, users of those tools have to resort to JavaScript, he said.Mashups can be authored within the administrative UI, with a text editor, or with any popular IDE, WSO2 said."It's an interesting aspect to choose JavaScript as sort of the primary scripting language," said analyst Michael Cote of RedMonk. JavaScript has been primarily used in AJAX-style (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) development, Cote noted. But plenty of people are familiar with JavaScript, he added.Built on the WSO2 Web services application Server, WSO2 Mashup Server can use information from Web services, HTML, and feeds and publishes the result as a Web service. Each service has metadata to simplify consumption by other mashups and Web services clients. Content and presentation are separated through XML and Web services to enable a service to be consumed by another mashup.Web service and UI artifacts are generated, such as WSDL, REST URLS and JavaScript stubs. Services can be composed from such sources as Web services, RSS, and HTML.Additionally, services can be accessed using a request-response pattern or be programmed to run over a long period of time. For example, a mashup initiating instant messaging alerts can warn transport companies about possible delays when there is snow.By leveraging WSO2's application server and registry, the mashup server gains capabilities for enterprise security, reliability, and governance, WSO2 said.Mooshup.com is being launched in a beta version. "The purpose is to help us drive downloads of Mashup Server," Marsh said.WSO2 sells support services for Mashup Server, with prices ranging from $2,000 per server per year to $8,000 per server per year, depending on levels of support.
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(InfoWorld) - Software AG plans to unveil details of Version 7.1 of the webMethods business process management suite on Wednesday, along with a new enterprise service bus (ESB) and a supply chain performance optimization tool. WhenÂ Software AG bought webMethodsÂ on June 1, it set ambitious targets forÂ integration of the two companies' product lines. This is the first update to the webMethods BPM suite since the merger: Version 7.0 was launched late in 2006. "They are making quite good progress, considering there's a lot to integrate," said Jason Bloomberg, a managing partner of IT analyst firm ZapThink. Among the BPM features that Software AG plans to unveil are simulation tools for testing the performance of new business processes, preconfigured performance indicators for management methodologies such as Six Sigma, and business calendar integration tools. Those allow the automatic offloading of certain tasks into workflow scheduling systems such as Lotus Notes or Exchange when human intervention is required, said Peter KÃ¼rpick, president and chief product officer of the webMethods product line. WebMethods is also getting its dose of "Web 2.0" technology: a new "tagging" feature will allow users to give the objects involved in business processes recognizable names, rather than those chosen by the program's developers or by systems integrators. "You can have one central instance and different ways of expressing it," KÃ¼rpick said. "This is particularly important when you go into a vertical market," he said, citing health care as an example where software tools borrowed from business might refer to "customers," but users would know them as "patients." Other new software elements include a business activity monitoring tool, Optimize for B2B, designed to give suppliers or customers a view of the supply chain, and the enterprise service bus with support for SOAP 1.2, WS Security, and WS-I. Software AG is already testing webMethods 7.1 with a few customers and will demonstrate it at theÂ Integration World 2007Â conference in Florida in early November. The software will be made generally available by the end of the year, KÃ¼rpick said The company has also been working on its services-oriented architecture (SOA) management and governance tools. It has taken the policy management tools from webMethods' Infravio line and its own CentraSite metadata store, combining them as CentraSite Governance Edition. It will unveil details of that product at the SOA Governance Summit in Copenhagen next month. With its focus on the webMethods BPM suite, Software AG will no longer sell its Crossvision BPM line, actually a rebranded version of Fujitsu's Interstage. Its goal is to help customers migrate to webMethods over the course of several years, during which it will continue to support the discontinued product. However, "customers are not yet lining up for migration," KÃ¼rpick said. This is one area where there's no rush, though, said ZapThink's Bloomberg: the majority of Crossvision BPM customers also use Software AG's Natural programming language and Adabas database, and they have no reason to leave the company.
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Hosted CRM service provider Salesforce.com took another step forward last week in its strategy to build an online ecosystem of vendors that offer software as a service.
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SOA Express offers a way to move to SOA by  converting code from existing services.