The Gartner Application Integration and Web Services conference kicked off on Monday after some pre-show tutorials on Sunday by Dave Chappell and Beth Gold-Bernstein, two prominent writers and speakers on Service Oriented Architecture.
A number of products were announced at the show, notably Oracle releasing it's suite for Event Driven Architecture (EDA). Oracle EDA Suite includes a design time environment to easily define and correlate events; Oracle Enterprise Service Bus to collect and distribute events; Oracle Business Rules to define business policies on events; Oracle Business Activity Monitoring to monitor and analyze Business Events; and pre-built solutions for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and other systems.
This announcement was presaged by pundits on the Internet who mostly derided the nomenclature used to market the suite--SOA 2.0. The advisory firm Macehiter Ward Dutton in the UK even went so far as to start an online petition protesting the name "SOA 2.0" as "dumbfounding". Nevertheless, the term SOA 2.0 was used previously by Gartner analysts including Yefim Natis, who merely referred to the phenomenon in his talk as "Advanced SOA". Other buzzwords heard about the conference included the neologism "POX" which apparently stands for "Plain Old XML".
Another product announced at the show was the TigerLogic FastSOA Product from RainingData corporation. FastSOA uses the RainingData XDBMS system to natively cache XML in the middle tier thus speeding data access for SOA applications, particularly real time data intensive applications. FastSOA is the brainchild of Frank Cohen, the founder of open source test framework Push2Test.
In Frank Kenney's well attended talk about SOA Governance, he emphasized the need for maintaining control over processes, policies, services, transformations and profiles. He went as far as to say that you only need one service before you need a registry because of the number of other valuable assets which are recorded there. He said that "your SOA will fail without a registry" (twice), however, he tempered that by saying that end users in some cases might use something as simple as an excel spreadsheet.
SOA Governance was a popular theme at the conference, as was Event Driven Architecture (EDA) and the perennial favorite, Business Process. You can read more about late breaking news at the show's blog.