I’m on a roll right now with the Impact 2008 SOA Jam (a few hours before it opens officially of course)

Anyway, the link is here and the content of the jam follows:

 

What would implementing this idea accomplish?

Some kind of consolidation needs to occur at either a runtime level, or tooling. Unify the programming models to enable a single skilled resource the ability to work with all of these products interchangeably. They all accomplish the same goal of transforming messages from a source to a destination, but all do them in vastly different ways.

How would it work? How might it be implemented?

If the tooling is unified: I get a ‘candy’ ui that decides the type of artifacts to generate based on the runtime I select. I foresee say using the WID editor with business object mapping, but deploying to a DataPower device which receives the XSLT equivalent. If it was to message broker, different runtime artifacts are created.

What are the benefits to the stakeholders of this idea?

This gives me, as a practitioner, a chance to be skill enabled at the developer level for the entire ESB stack. Increasing the range of gigs that I can accept. It also lowers the cost to customers who will have a larger pool of skilled workers to select from. It helps IBM by reducing the redundancy that exists in the platforms as they stand now.