From Big Blue, a How-To on SOAs

While IBM has already created service-oriented architecture software, services and design centers for customers, the company hadn’t provided a wealth of advice for programmers on how to build their own.

That is about to change on Monday with the announcement of an expanded section on its Developer Works site that provides tutorials on how to craft SOAs , an increasingly popular distributed computing approach to
application integration. SOAs cover Web services and other software components designed to integrate disparate applications on a network.

Developer Works is an IBM-sponsored site geared to provide Java
programmers with tools, code and education o how to write applications for
the IBM Software Development Platform.

Announced at JavaOne, the Armonk, N.Y. vendor’s expanded section for SOAs,
Developer Works Web services Zone, aims to help developers expand their scope
of Web services to tie software and IT processes to real business processes.

Gina Poole, vice president of developer marketing and Web communities, ISV &
developer relations, told internetnews.com the toolset is based on
WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation, a J2EE runtime integration
server with support for Business Process Execution Language ,
as well as Tivoli infrastructure management and security software.

New content includes articles, including “Elements of Service-Oriented Analysis and Design” about how to
craft an Enterprise Service Bus .

IBM, HP , BEA Systems , Microsoft and a host of smaller vendors, such as Cape Clear, Infravio,
Systinet, Actional and Amberpoint are all creating software behind the veil
of strong SOA marketing messages.

While the larger companies have more clout and engineers to throw at
building cutting-edge architectures, the smaller vendors are focusing on
carving out niches in the Web services and SOA space. Specialty areas
include monitoring and logging, security and metadata management. Be they
SOAs or Web services, integration programming to simplify software is a hot
trend.

IBM Monday also unveiled five new Java technologies on its alphaWorks site
for programmers, Poole said. Message Schedule for Java (MS4J) allows
developers to execute message on Java objects asynchronously and repeatedly
to keep the data cache fresh and enhance the stability for a Web site.

Asynchronous IO for Java (AJava) is a tool that helps Java server manage
high-volume distribution, enabling input and output to be performed on files
asynchronously, which means the operating system hands the data over to a
subsystem so it can perform another task rather than waiting for a
synchronous message.

Application Privacy Monitoring for JDBC (APM4JDBC) is a Java SQL Library
that works with IBM’s Tivoli Privacy Manager to provide privacy monitoring
for J2EE applications. Development Tool for Java-COM Bridge ,
which enables the integration of COM and Java components in one
application, allowing them to communicate bi-directionally through the Java
Native Interface.

Lastly, Poole said IBM has created a Java game called Code Ruler. Built as
an Eclipse plug-in, developers can program code using a Java API
and the game provides a unified way to test game code in real
time.