Seeing how I’m not at Impact 2008, my impressions are going to be more geared towards what I see being said in the blogs, the twitter stream and the participation in the SOA Jam.

My first impression comes from the SOA Jam, where I think I’ve posted two pretty good ideas. The first being that we desperately need IBM to foster an external community. The other that the ESB products overlap too much, reducing the pool of skilled applicants. IBM says that 6000 people are in attendance for this conference, yet the total number of entries after day one of the Jam is 22 with 70 comments. That means that we’re jamming with 0.3% idea generation and 1.1% commenting participation rates (assuming no duplicates). I find this to be very low for a Jam that ends Thursday morning. It will be interesting to see what happens the rest of the week with the numbers. I’m not sure if there is any actual active promotion of the jam going on, or participants just don’t care.

As for my contributions, they seem to be progressing at an acceptable rate. I’ve got five comments about the external community where most are in agreement and three on the ESB. The external community is the one that I hope sinks in and takes hold. It’s low hanging fruit that IBM can leverage, whereas modifying the architecture for various products is more of a dream that I’m hoping finds roost in the head of someone who matters.

On the ESB side, I’m getting kind of what I expected: some agreement some disagreement. The disagreements usually come when someone makes the point that they are all targeted to different users. I say that at a high level, they all do the same thing. I accept that the runtimes are unique and will likely never change. That doesn’t preclude changing the tooling to be uniform.

I’m a developer, I’m already implementing systems (in WID) in an abstract way with boxes that represent functionality and lines that represent relationship. Why can’t what runtime I choose to deploy my solution to be abstracted as well?