SOA Gateway and the Cloud

Having recently seen a number of presentations about Cloud, it has struck me that like SOA, we are seeing the same boxes being placed in a similar pattern and there seems to be an assumption that they will simply communicate with each other. Is it any wonder that people are turned off some of these new advances in technology when the powerpoints make it look so easy. The Cloud offers some fantastic benefits in terms of making resources available easily and 'on demand', however, if the applications that are implemented within the cloud are using proprietary technologies to talk to each other, they will become locked to the one Cloud. One of the dreams of Cloud Computing is an ability to pick the best Cloud based on your most important criteria be that cost, availability etc. Then why should you not be able to roam from Cloud to Cloud as the criteria change. We believe that the usage of standards based interfaces to communicate between applications in the Cloud gives the best of both worlds as discussed here.

Best regards,

John Power - Free Industry Papers Here

Best of Breed Mainframe Integration and SOA Tools

I came across this white paper recently which touched on a number of the confusing aspects about SOA 'terminology' for want of a better word. Statements like '...with the connectivity and accessibillity offered by an SOA offers a great deal of promise....' confuse the issue even more IMHO as implementing a SOA in itself does not help with connectivity, accessibility or integration. When I originally came across SOA, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with the above but as I have said in other postings, the term SOA has now become so abused that it needs to be clarified what is meant. To be fair in this document, as one gets deeper into it, it gets into the standards that are used that do provide the ability to discover and use services available on mainframe. At the end of the day, most mainframe shops are also likely to be running at least one other server platform such as Linux or one of the various flavours of UNIX available. It is clear that getting at resources on both the mainframe and other platforms in a standard way is a base requirement which will ensure an organization can get the key benefits of implementing an SOA with an improved ability to reuse resources. While there are a number of ways to do this, it generally requires different tools for different resources. For example, there is generally one tool to access databases with another to access business logic. It is sometimes also necessary to use different tools on different platforms leading to multiple different interfaces. The SOA Gateway has been designed to provide a single tool to get at data and business logic on any platform thus providing a single, standard way to access core assets on these different platforms.

Best regards,

John - SOA Tools