SOA Security in Practice
Nicolai M. Josuttis discusses various issues encountered when implementing SOA security: heterogeneity and debugging are problematic, ESB plays an important role, and costs involved.
Nicolai M. Josuttis discusses various issues encountered when implementing SOA security: heterogeneity and debugging are problematic, ESB plays an important role, and costs involved.
In his new post Subbu Allamaraju discusses some of the problems with current APIs usage and suggests the introduction of an additional layer responsible for aligning APIs to the client requirements.
Jaime Ryan in an article for ComputerWorld recommends the replacement of ESBs with lower-cost, easy-to-use and lightweight modern SOA gateways which fulfill not only the typical ESB functional requirements but also add non-functional capabilities. InfoQ spoke to Jaime Ryan to present his detailed analysis behind this reasoning.

Mulesoft recently released Mule 3, their next generation ESB platform. The product comes with a lot of architectural changes under the hood to support the features aimed at making the product easier to use, such as Mule Cloud Connect and Flow, a message flow based service design. InfoQ caught up with Ross Mason to learn more about the product release and the new features in the product offering.

This paper looks at various error handling considerations associated with design of re-usable services and provides an outline of what error handling considerations apply during SOA analysis and design phases and also describes some best practices into designing these considerations to ensure that services are designed and implemented in all its completeness.
Peter Paul van de Beek presents a case study of using a service bus in a supply channel connecting a wholesale supplier with hundreds of retailers, the overall context and challenges faced – including the integration of POS software coming from different software providers-, the solution chosen and its implementation, how it worked out and the lessons learned along the way.

In this presentation, recorded at QCon London 2008, ThoughtWorks' Chief Scientist Martin Fowler and Global Head of Architecture Jim Webber share their views of the typical corporate ESB, which in their view has grown too fat for its own good. Martin and Jim suggest the Web's architecture as a possible and more light-weight alternative, in line with their preference for agile approaches.
Mule Creator Ross Mason discusses Mule's evolution over the years and what's new in Mule 3, as well as a new architectural pattern of using ESB's in the cloud. JSON as a data interchange format is discussed, as well as ESB's as a backend for mobile devices.

InfoQ talks to Mark Fisher, project lead for the Spring Integration project, about the framework. The interview talks about the origins of the framework, how it compares to using an ESB, and using Spring Integration with Spring Batch.

Composite Software offers a new level of granularity when compared to SaaS (Software as a Service). Composite Software is about enabling "right-sourcing", i.e. move (or keep) arbitrary small or large elements of functionality wherever it is the most cost effective to operate them, not just entire systems. Economically, "right-sourcing" is far more efficient than "outsourcing" and SaaS. The goal of this book is start by understanding today’s software construction processes and technologies and explore why and how it should be evolved to support core composition mechanisms.