WSO2 bringing Ruby to SOA
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WSO2 seeks to bridge the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails Web framework with the SOA and Web services spaces.
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Joseph Chiusano, Associate with Booz Allen Hamilton, provides an overview of the newly released OASIS Web Services Reliable Messaging (WSRM) standard and discusses the criticality of Web Services reliability for service-oriented architectures.
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There's a new article from PHPBuilder.com today that focuses on one of the "glue" that helps bind the web together (and is binding it more and more each day) - web services, specifically with PHP and SOAP.   Web Services is a system which enables and supports interoperability. It enables applications written in different languages, located in different places, running on different operating systems, to talk to each other, exchange information and perform different operations. The building blocks of Web Services are a set of XML based standards namely SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration).   They opted to go the NuSOAP route (the popular PHP4-ish way to do SOAP) but the same general ideas apply with with PHP5 implementation of the SOAP protocol.   They introduce web service a bit, explaining the different parts of the typical service setup then move into NuSOAP and examples of its use. Their code example sends a string ("Hello World") to the remote service that takes it in and validates it on if it's actually a string or not. If it is, all is returned well - otherwise, it returns an error.
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Well, this is some news I've been wanting to share for a while, but I've had to wait until everything was ready.  During the summer, I spoke at RubyConf*MI, one of the first regional Ruby Conferences (I think San Diego held the only one earlier than the Michigan folks).  At the time, they filmed all the presentations.
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Oracle at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco the week of Dec. 5 plans to unveil Oracle Integration, a product that combines the companyâs application server with several other technologies for integration and enablement of SOAs (service-oriented architectures).
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ReadiMinds WebServices Applications Suite 2.0 consists of tools to build, integrate, enable and manage enterprise Web services applications.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems will fit its Weblogic Server Java application server with improvements geared to Web 2.0, SOA and interoperability with Microsoft's .Net platform, the company said at the BEAWorld San Francisco conference on Wednesday. WebLogic Server 10.3 also features a new modular approach in which users can selectively download only components they want. The upgrade will be offered as a technology preview this fall with general availability set for next year. The application server's Web 2.0 capabilities are enabled through enhanced support for AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Adobe Flex, said Blake Connell, director of product marketing for WebLogic Server. AJAX provides for a dynamic element to Web applications that is identified with Web 2.0, Connell said. Specifically, a publish-and-subscribe engine within WebLogic Server will provide live updates to AJAX and Flex clients. The engine offers a persistent connection to a rich client, Connell said. BEA this week also announced an alliance with Adobe in which evaluation of copies of WebLogic Server will be featured with Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, the server component for Flex. In the SOA realm, WebLogic Server 10.3 backs SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) and improvements to the Java API for XML Web Services. "The big point in SOA is support for SAML 2.0, which provides Web single sign-on," Connell said. "SAML enables people to sign on securely with a Web client and then have access to other systems without having to keep re-logging in," Connell added. Java API for XML Web Services, meanwhile, is the specification used for writing Web services capabilities on top of the application server, he said. To accommodate .Net applications, WebLogic Server 10.3 will feature a JMS (Java Message Service) C# client. With this component, users who have deployed .Net systems but want to standardize on JMS as a messaging backbone can do that, Connell said. Leveraging BEA's microServices Architecture, version 10.3 allows for componentizing of WebLogic Server. For example, users could leave out the Java development kit or Enterprise JavaBeans and JMS capabilities if they do not need these, Connell said. "You save megabytes in download size," he said. Java Platform Standard Edition 6 is featured WebLogic Server 10.3, providing for better performance. "This is the underlying Java implementation upon which WebLogic Server sits on," Connell said. Also featured in version 10.3 is backing for the Spring 2.1 Java application framework and Java Persistence API for storing and retrieving application objects in a database. In other happenings at the conference Wednesday, BEA's Bruce Graham, vice president of consulting, likened the year 2007 to 1997, when now-giant companies like eBay and Amazon.com were just getting started. BEA also was in its infancy, he said. "2007 seems to me to be a watershed year," Graham said. Like 1997, young computer hackers are making lots of money and showing up on magazine covers. New companies are emerging with new business models like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook, he said. "There's a wave of innovation occurring, just like 1997," Graham said. Companies now must leverage IT assets to provide a competitive advantage, said Graham. He described SOA, business process management, and enterprise social networks as three preeminent waves of technology that have arisen in response to this need. Also at the conference this week, BEA Systems said it plans to enable its enterprise service bus and portal software products to run as virtual appliances next year. The AquaLogic Service Bus and WebLogic Portal products will run directly in virtualized environments such VMWare. Under the model being deployed by BEA, enterprise applications and supporting infrastructure can be deployed independent of the underlying server and operating system. This enables SOA services to be treated as virtual appliances that can be deployed wherever needed, representing a major shift in the software industry, the company said. BEA's virtual appliance plan is expected to be extended to other components of its Enterprise 360 platform as well, as part of the company's Liquid Enterprise strategy. The virtual appliance plan is being eyed for BEA products that have a volatile workload, said Guy Churchward, BEA vice president for WebLogic Products. BEA has begun offering an instance-based pricing model as part of its virtual appliance strategy, in which the customer pays based on how many instances of software are being deployed, rather than basing pricing the number of CPUs. The company has implemented this strategy with the WebLogic Server -- Virtual Edition variant of its application server.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA jumped ahead of the pack last week, announcing the industryâs first native SOA platform, SOA 360. But the company left enough unanswered questions about the new platform to prompt one analyst to say thereâs still much explaining to do. SOA 360 spans three BEA product families: Tuxedo, WebLogic, and AquaLogic and providesÂ  a âunifying methodologyâ for modeling, creating, developing, and deploying an SOA application using all of BEAâs SOA products, said Rob Levy, executive vice president and CTO of BEA. SOA 360 features a collaborative tooling environment, called WorkSpace 360, and a common software architecture, dubbed mSA (microServices Architecture), that is based on SOA and the concept of a services network. âI think the industry is looking for an approach to SOA that is different,âÂ  CEO Alfred Chuang said, noting that BEA wants to approach SOA with a process, not just a product. WorkSpace 360 allows users with different roles â such as business analyst, enterprise architect, and developer â to collaborate. mSA is an event-driven architecture that uses notification services to publish and discover modular components or âmicroServices.â mSA will use industry protocols and standards such as OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative), SOAP, WSDL, XML Schema, WS-Security, and SAML and will deliver backplane components, application frameworks, as well as activity, presentation, and infrastructure services. BEA wants all its products to use mSA by the end of 2008. BEA revealed in March that it would make its WebLogic Server application server modular. The company now believes this approach can work for all its products, said Bill Roth, vice president of the BEA tools unit. âModularization will be a key design point for us, and ultimately [mSA] will have an effect across all of our products,â Roth said. But Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Current Analysis, found BEAâs presentations âvagueâ about details such as what makes something mSA-enabled.Â  âThereâs just too many unanswered questions right now,â Willett said.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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"Rubinius is a project to watch", so says Charles Nutter in his post Rite, Rubinius, and Everything &mdash; I think he's right.  Evan is hard at work making things work better in rubinius.  He's now got continuations working (I think this makes him the first alternative implementation of Ruby to do so), and says he should have serializable continuations soon (see his post on it here).  W00t!
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With the flexibility to keep IT and business in close alignment, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the foundation of an agile IT infrastructure. How does the SOA vision make tactical change easier? What are your options for deploying an enterprise SOA now? Who has succeeded and what was achieved? Join this 3-Part webinar series to learn about SOA, understand the requirements for an enterprise service bus (ESB), and understand how customers are benefiting from operational SOAs today.
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(InfoWorld) - Blueprints for implementing interoperable and secure Web services are being amended by the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) to incorporate the latest SOAP technology and reliable message transmission, representatives of organization said on Thursday. During a meeting at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference in San Francisco, WS-I officials cited plans to upgrade the group's Basic Profile and Basic Security Profile and release a Reliable Secure Profile. WS-I profiles feature implementation guidelines on using related Web services specifications together for interoperability. Membership in WS-I features a roster of the computer industry's major players. Companies like BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and Sun are among the participants. The industry has embraced the WS-I Basic Profile to enable interoperability of Web services between different vendors' products, said Michael Bechauf, WS-I president and chairman. "The reception has been incredible," said Bechauf, who also is vice president of industry standards at WS-I member SAP. WS-I is working concurrently on two upgrades to Basic Profile, versions 1.2 and 2.0. Due by the end of the year, version 1.2 adds support for SOAP-based attachments and WS-Addressing for addressing of Web services and messages. Version 2.0, expected in 2008, changes the SOAP implementation from SOAP 1.1 to SOAP 1.2, promising performance improvements for embedded devices, WS-I officials said. WS-I did not consolidate the two Basic Profile upgrades because switching SOAP versions requires a major upgrade to products. Basic Profile 1.0 was published in August 2003 with version 1.1 following a year later. The advent of Basic Profile has had a positive impact on Web services, said analyst Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director of Burton Group. "Once that came out, a lot of our most egregious interoperability issues went away," Manes said. Vendors began adopting it, and people followed these rules as systems were being developed, she said. Manes cited errors in WSDL 1.1 as an example of egregious errors that impeded Web services implementation. Basic Security Profile 1.1, planned for ratification by the end of 2007, includes capabilities for single sign-on for Web services applications in multiple systems. This is accomplished through support for the WS-Security 1.1 specification, which backs new token profiles, particularly around XAML. WS-I is seeking five interoperable implementations of Basic Security Profile 1.1, which is a requirement for ratification. Basic Security Profile 1.0 was published March 30. With Reliable Secure Profile 1.0, also anticipated by the end of the year, WS-I is accommodating reliable transmission of messages. This differs from the Basic Security Profile, which covers encryption and signatures. Reliable Secure Profile will incorporate support for the WS-ReliableMessaging 1.1 and WS-SecureConversation 1.3 specifications. WS-I at the conference Thursday evening plans to demonstrate interoperability offered by Basic Security Profile, featuring technologies from IBM, Microsoft, Novell, SAP, and Sun involved in a supply chain management application. Also, a group of companies at the conference will be featured in an interoperability demonstration of the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language 2.0 standard from OASIS. Among the participants are IBM, CA, Oracle, and Red Hat.
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Web services may be unfortunately trendy, but having a simple API for other people to use your application is very powerful and useful. Is SOAP the right way to go? Sam Tregar describes an alternate approach he's pulled from working the Bricolage and Krang APIs.
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From the RefreshinglyBlue blog, there's a new post that makes a comparison between two of the most popular web scripting languages - PHP and Ruby - on a practical, basic level.   There are rather significant syntactical differences between PHP and Ruby. For example PHP requires semicolons at the end of lines and generally requires curly brackets to enclose blocks of code. Ruby, on the other hand, uses newline characters to denote the end of a line of code...   The post goes through other differences like: value return methods, function/method naming, similarities between them, frameworks, namespaces, documentation and hosting options.
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(InfoWorld) - Heralding the most viable, "real-world" approach to building SOAs (service-oriented architectures)Â this week,Â MicrosoftÂ  unveiled new guidelines for partners create an enterprise service bus (ESB). Usually, BEA Systems and IBM beat the SOA drum the loudest, but Microsoft renamed its Business Process and Integration Conference for BizTalk partners "SOA and Business Process Conference" with the aim demonstrate that it, too, has a plan for helping customers build SOAs. Microsoft has had itsÂ business process integration product BizTalk since 2000, but it has not been as vocal as competitors BEA and IBM in discussing a comprehensive SOA strategy. SOA is the next generation of enterprise software architectures, in which applications and services within the IT system are loosely coupled and able to be integrated piecemeal to form custom, or "composite," applications from various components across the enterprise. Microsoft worked with partner Neudesic to provide sample code and documentation for using BizTalk Server to build an ESB, which Microsoft defines as a set of capabilities -- such as mediation, transformation and integration -- for connecting business processes and services throughout the organization, said Steven Martin, a Microsoft director of product management. The company also unveiled a new adapter for Extensible Markup Language-based BizTalk that enables customers to connect the product more easily to IBM mainframe and AS/400 systems. The technology, called the BizTalk Adapter for Host Systems, is based on technologies available in Microsoft's Host Integration Server product, which the company has had for some time, Martin said. John Devadoss, a Microsoft director of architecture, said it is still finding a lot of misconceptions about SOAs among its customers, who think they have to rearchitect their entire software infrastructure "from the top down" to build SOAs. On the contrary, Microsoft believes that SOAs are more successful if there is a "real-world business driver" behind the architecture, he said. "In the real world, the success stories we see are customers taking a pragmatic, middle-out approach," he said. "The only way to truly track to the needs of the business is to take small steps along the way. The mega projects are either big science projects that never get finished or they diverge from the needs of the business."ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Two new specifications are published by Microsoft, Systinet, Sonic Software, and BEA. WS-Enumeration is a protocol for enumerating a sequence of XML elements that is suitable for traversing logs, message queues, or other linear information models and WS-Transfer is a protocol for accessing XML representations of Web service-based resources.
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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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In a new post, Christopher Jones talks about some difficulty a friend of his was having with returning a connection type from Oracle back to a script. In his case, it was a Ruby script and, unfortunately, there's no direct support for it. So, Christopher jumped in to help out.    PHP's oci8 extension oci_bind_array_by_name() can bind collections but there is no equivalent in ruby-oci8.    Justin outlines a solution on his blog Ruby: Invoking a PL/SQL Package with Array args. His example relies on some company infrastructure so I came up with this standalone example.  This first SQL*Plus script sets up the scenario.     Stick with me on this one - there's some PHP right there at the end. He shows how much simpler the same kind of operation would be in PHP thanks to the oci_bind_array_by_name functionality understanding the return value. What took about 20 lines for just the Ruby code to handle the result correctly takes only five in PHP.