This session was delivered by Martin Wildberger, IBM VP and Director of the Toronto Software Lab.

This session was attended by around 70 people, a pretty large turnout for one of these all-day events.

Martin asked the crowd if they were from the line of business side or the IT side. I didn’t see a single hand raised for the LOB, so as expected most people in the crowd are interested in SOA from an IT perspective.

There was a slide about comments from Gartner regarding “Don’t postpone SOA…. Reprioritize your road map”

1. “… [prioritize] projects that will turn an ROI faster”
2. “…address lower-cost projects sooner”
3. “Choose SOA projects were reuse of established systems is prevalent”

This is a great heuristic to determine SOA project candidacy and prioritization.

Martin went through a set of slides about the success of SOA at various companies and the capabilities that can be leveraged to increase ROI.

WebSphere sMash was also brought up as an integral product to the story.

Also, this is a slide that I’ve seen so many times, I wish someone would redesign it in a new color:

Avoid the notion of explaining SOA in terms of IT. Explain it in terms of business value, agility.

Related Posts

• ICTY Toronto 2008: Lower Operational Costs and Improving Quality of Service Using Application Virtualization
• Impact 2008: SOA Jam Day 3
• Impact 2008: Impressions of Day 2
• Impact 2008: SOA Jam – “ESB: Too Many Products, Skill Spread too thin”
• Impact 2008: SOA Jam – “Foster an External Community for Practitioners”

From DeveloperWorks, Introducing IBM WebSphere sMash, Part 1: Build RESTful services for your Web application

In this series, learn all about IBM WebSphere sMash, a simple environment for creating, assembling, and executing applications based on current Web technologies. In this first article, get a hands-on tour of the innovations that let you create, assemble, and deploy powerful Web applications. Learn how WebSphere sMash is community driven, and about its conventions for creating RESTful Web services. Using a step-by-step example, you set up the environment, create a project, build a RESTful service to expose data, test your application, and import a sample application to consume the RESTful services.

Step-by-step examples are always good in getting up to speed on a new software platform.

Related Posts

• Project Zero – Introduction
• ICTY Toronto 2008: A Smart SOA Approach in Any Economic Climate
• Impact 2008: Impressions of Day 2

Day two is in the bag, the B52’s are B-50-done. Perficient and MTS Allstream gave a session about SOA Patterns that I thought was today but was actually yesterday. Oops. Here’s the abstract if you have a time machine:

TSP-2518 – Effectively selecting integration patterns
Brent Legris, Perficient, Inc., Senior Technical Architect, Olivera Zatezalo, MTS Allstream Inc., Sr Manager, Integration, BT&IT

The foundation of knowledge that rests beneath service oriented architecture (SOA) encompasses a myriad of integration patterns not only messaging, enterprise service bus and orchestration, but shared databases, ETL, operational data stores, and others. Effectively selecting between integration patterns is a critical capability to develop as your SOA evolves, in order to avoid running around with a hammer thinking everything is a nail. This session interactively develops various integration scenarios, discussing pattern alternatives and their effective implementation. We will discuss the tradeoffs of different approaches, but close with guidelines that can be consistently followed to exploit the capabilities of an enterprise infrastructure.

Level: Intermediate

What I like about this presentation is that it’s about patterns and decisions and trade-offs, but primarily focuses on WebSphere Integration Developer and WebSphere Process Server. I like it when patterns come ‘out from the mist’ and you actually see them implemented in a system. I’m a developer at heart. Hopefully the presentation slides will be made available on the Impact site.

The other thing I heard a lot about was WebSphere sMash the IBM commercialized, supported version of Project Zero.

As for other impressions of Day 2, I don’t really have any. It seemed like a normal day at a conference in Vegas to me.

Related Posts

• Impact 2008: My impressions of Day One – SOA Jam
• Impact 2008: Impressions of Day 2 – SOA Jam
• Impact 2008: My impressions of Day One – Blogs & Twitter
• Impact 2008: SOA Jam Day 3
• Impact 2008: Final Day – Blogs

Project Zero is:

..about agile development of the next generation of dynamic Web applications. Project Zero introduces a simple environment for creating, assembling and running applications based on popular Web technologies. The Project Zero environment includes a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP with application programming interfaces optimized for producing REST-style services, integration mash-ups and rich Web interfaces.

Why the brew-ha-ha about yet another runtime? My interpretation of the goal of Project Zero is to take the enterprise concepts contained in a “heavy-weight’ solution like WebSphere and let those concepts be run on a light-weight server using scripting languages and an XPath-like syntax. The goal is to bring the cost of integration solutions for small to medium sized business down by stripping out and simplifying the interface to the runtime.

Project Zero simplifies next-generation Web application development and increases developer productivity by providing:

* A simplified approach to development through the introduction of agile programming and assembly techniques which are attractive to Web developers.
* A platform optimized around popular technologies found on the Web that are recognized for their ability to lower complexity and shorten development time. This platform uses REST and ATOM to form the basis of the service invocation model; JSON and XML as the data interchange format; and Ajax as the model for a rich client.
* Building blocks that enable developers to get applications up and running quickly by leveraging reusable components such as code snippets, widgets, libraries, templates and pre-built services.

One of my goals this year is to get more familiar with Project Zero. I only know about it from marketing slides and ‘firehose’ presentations at conferences. It sounds like a very intriguing product.

You can learn more about it from their FAQ

Related Posts

• Introducing IBM WebSphere sMash, Part 1: Build RESTful services for your Web application
• ICTY Toronto 2008: A Smart SOA Approach in Any Economic Climate
• Impact 2008: Impressions of Day 2