A combination of Java Enterprise Edition 5, aka J2EE, and Oracle’s Project Fusion middleware components will build the service-oriented architecture (SOA) of Oracle’s future.
It’s either a brilliant idea or it isn’t. Detractors see no difference between so-called 1.0 and 2.0 versions of SOA. Advocates like Oracle believe the difference is quite noticeable.
During the JavaOne Conference, Oracle executive Thomas Kurian, Senior VP for server technologies, discussed the future of Oracle and its next-generation application platform.
A report by Search Web Services showed how J2EE will figure in the SOA 2.0 world. Kurian contended that developers would adopt the latest version of J2EE, which will make it easier for them to build interfaces for underlying applications.
“We see a new application development framework emerging,” he said at the conference. Interfaces for those applications would be constructed using Java Server Faces technology.
The Fusion and J2EE framework behind SOA 2.0 would be an event-driven architecture instead of the conventional client/server methods employed in the present implementations of SOA. Some don’t see the big deal.
Joe McKendrick of ZDNet noted how JBoss director of standards Mark Little derided the proposal:
In response to talk about SOA 2.0, Mark Little says “I expected more of Oracle on this one! Giving an architectural approach a version number is crazy: it makes no sense at all! Can you imagine going back in pre-history: is a hut also to be known as Cave 2.0? Would a house be Cave 3.0 or Hut 2.0?”
Oracle seems to be hedging its bets too. InfoWorld reported how Oracle is playing it safe when it comes to development:
The company, however, still is not climbing aboard the Sun Microsystems-driven NetBeans community for open source tools, but is sticking with its strategy of accommodating the rival Eclipse platform and Oracle’s own JDeveloper tool.
“We have a lot of customers where we see Eclipse come up in accounts,” said Ted Farrell, Oracle chief architect and vice president of tools and middleware.
“If we saw a similar push for NetBeans for the industry, we’d probably address that as well,” Farrell said.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
