We talked recently with Bill Wilkins, who together with others has founded Adjoovo to address these kind of metadata issues. Adjoovo contends project failure is often rooted in the fact that underlying metadata assets are ignored as an organization builds new services. The company is building out a more inclusive metadata repository, or framework. It sees limits that exist with some current SOA-style repositories.

Wilkins says that the mismanagement of what exists “leads to architectural fragmentation and much higher levels of complexity.” Wilkins comes to these considerations after experience with Sun Microsystems in its SOA, WOA and ESB efforts. Naturally, Java artifacts are among the artifacts Adjoovo will look to register.

“We are trying to provide a framework that can handle diverse artifacts,” he told SearchSOA.com.

The company recently fielded its first downloadable sample software in the form of an Adjoovo Spaces community edition, and is looking for interested users to try it out and provide feedback.

The Vordel Cloud Service Broker (CSB) aggregates services from multiple domains including private, public and community clouds. The CSB registers the services from all three domains into a single repository, which the company says will simplify management, monitoring and policy enforcement. The CSB also includes features for caching, acceleration, analysis and transformation.

The major piece of the CSB is the Multi-Domain Registry Repository (MDDR), which aggregates the services across domains. The MDDR registers services from public cloud offerings from vendors like Amazon and Google along side users’ own on-premises systems so they can be dealt with from a central point.

Though Oracle has lately worked to quell concerns that it might dump support for Sun Microsystem’s GlassFish application server and NetBeans IDE, many still feel doubtful that any legitimate resources will back the open source tools.

In a discussion on TheServerSide.com, some saw Oracle’s message as perhaps a small comfort rather than a great reassurance.

“I think that in the short period, it would be difficult for Oracle to suspend any big activity by Sun,” wrote Francesco Ladanza, “as it would lose part of the splendid open source community that is one of the best values that Sun has earned in these years.”

Oracle will want to get as much value from the Sun acquisition as possible and it is tough to ignore the open source community that GlassFish has developed. Bill Wilkins wrote that the fact that GlassFish V3 is built on an OSGi core may also make it attractive to the company’s app server strategy.

That being considered, GlassFish would be competing with the Oracle WebLogic Server and Netbeans with JDeveloper and Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. Those are more internally-competing products than Oracle may be able to justify in the mid-term, Wilkins wrote.

The jury is out on whether Oracle will condense these pieces of Sun’s legacy into existing products or allow them to develop in tandem. But Jens Eckels was not exactly reassured.

“It’s hard not to notice they never said they were committing to monetarily supporting NetBeans strategically, or that they see it as a viable entity,” said Eckels. “They specifically talk about throwing money at other Sun products, and then carefully tread around NetBeans with “committed to choice” and “complement” language.”

“If anything, we’re going to invest more in MySQL,” Ellison said at the conference keynote. “Not less.”

Furthering these sentiments, Oracle has released a number of statements and, recently, a FAQ stating the company’s position across many of its major divisions and aquisitions.

In the FAQ, Oracle said Sun’s open-source Java application server, Glassfish, is far from in any danger.

Oracle plans to continue evolving GlassFish Enterprise Server, delivering it as the open source reference implementation (RI) of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specifications, and actively supporting the large GlassFish community. Additionally, Oracle plans to invest in aligning common infrastructure components and innovations from Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server to benefit both Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server customers.

 

As for NetBeans, the company reaffirmed both JDeveloper’s position as Fusion Middleware’s main development tool and the open source tool’s availability should customers prefer it.

Also in the FAQ, Oracle stated its position on MySQL in the same Vein as its chief.

“Oracle plans to spend more money developing MySQL than Sun does now,” the FAQ stated.

The company also said it plans to add open-source MySQL to its existing suite of database products.

Virtualization, services and ever cheaper hardware paved the way from grid to cloud. It may be too early to say, but cloud does seem to be a bit of a better play for a wider variety of jobs. Part of the reason grid didn’t get too far off the mark was that its poster stories were usually scientific applications…something of a niche.

Still, it is interesting to conjecture on how science  -  both big and small science – will be done on the cloud. Relational data bases are a tried and true way of dealing with data, scientific and other. The cloud at this point is highly influenced by Google’s flatter MapReduce/Hadoop ways of handling data. Still, Amazon just augmented its SimpleDB with a straightahead RDB (MySQL).

Some view on the nature of that possible transformation of science data and cloud this we comes via Michael Schatz.  For the biology community, moving to MapReduce/Hadoop-style architecture would be a challenging undertaking. SOAP and XML made some serious inroads there. Schatz is working on adapting important bioinformatics tools to the cloud paradigm. He has discussed the issues on SourceForge where he documents some project work. Check out Haddop for Computational Biology.

Some of the features include the Codegen Plug-in Wizard for Eclipse, sport for the WS-* stack, SOAP messaging for Web services and clients and a host of supported platforms.

More on WSF/C++

The company says this does not signify a change in direction for AWS but an increase in options available to developers. This may appeal to developers who would like a cloud-based MySQL database that is managed externally.

“In the database crowd there is no one-size-fits-all option,” Adam Selipsky, VP of AWS told SearchSOA.com. “Some customers want to run something that’s not like MySQL but actually is MySQL.”

From Amazon’s release:

Amazon RDS provides a fully featured MySQL database, so the code, applications, and tools that developers use today with their existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. The service automatically handles common database administration tasks such as setup and provisioning, patch management, and backup - storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. Customers also have the flexibility to scale the compute and storage resources associated with their database instance through a simple API call.

Word of the next version of Visual Studio brought as well the news that Microsoft was planning to offer its core Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server product to all Visual Studio users.

This appears to end the divergence of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System. In its own terms, Microsoft has ‘’simplified the product lineup” for Visual Studio 2010. There are three basic versions expected: VS 2010 Ultimate, VS 2010 Premium and VS Professional. All are offered along with MSDN services. Visual Team Foundation Server is offered with all VS versions. But the server version of Visual Studio known as Visual Studio Team system is going away.

The Microsoft team offering first appeared as VSTS 2005. It came out at a time when many enterprises were seeking to improve the code quality and on-time delivery record of software development groups. No question, such motives were behind the concurrent industry push toward SOA. For Microsoft, VSTS was something of an answer to IBM’s Rational tools suite. But as it tends to do with these things, Microsoft took its own tack — forgoing industry-standard UML for enterprise modeling, and putting energy behind a set of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) instead.

A database development profile was over time one of the more interesting developments on the VSTS front. Its first rev of the important base Visual Team Foundation Server was plagued by configuration issues. As it looked to launch a new VSTS rev in 2010, the company finally tracked back to field a UML offering.

Through recent years, Microsoft’s reputation as a maker of excellent desktop developer tools remained intact. But it never proved outright that it could create successful, high-price-tag server-based developer suites.

Funny thing though, the client-server era for quality software development seems to be passing quickly. Development teams are very often global. Agile collaborative tool vendors such as VersionOne and Rally focus on Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings, rather than client-server. IBM is in the midst of refashioning Rational tools for more Web availablity. Microsoft rides that trend by making Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server part of an online MSDN package.

Microsoft needs to continue to nurture the art of team development. Its patterns & practices group would be a place where such an effort could conceivably flower.

A recent example of this is the ADO.NET Entity Framework…

Entity Framework is a significant new take on application development for the .NET developer, but it is no slam dunk to update, especially if the .NET developer is writing to an Oracle data base. That means an opening for a data specialist such as Data Direct.

This summer the company began to offer a high-speed data access provider connecting the ADO.NET Entity Framework to Oracle DBs. Included are support for schemas, binary data types, BLOBs, XML and more.

We spoke with Jonathan Bruce, who manages DataDirect efforts for .NET and Windows platforms and SQL Engine technologies. He said there is a large coalescence beginning to happen around a single data model among Microsoft developers. That model takes the form of the Entity Framework.

“You have the central model defined now. While ADO.NET is always going to be there,
you are going to see more and more conversations around the Entity Framework as the way to get data access from the .NET platform,” he said.

Still, of course, as Bruce notes, there are always more than one way to do something like data access. One well established alternative to Enitity Framework is NHibernate, the .NET version of Hibernate.

“It is good to note the NHibernate crowd remains extremely active. I think you will see those two technologies work equally together for quite some time. And that indeed is a good thing, because competition breeds better technology,” he said. “I think they are learning from each other.”

Have we said this before? Jonathan Bruce’s blog is a great repository of data on data. Go ahead, access it!

A group of SOA experts released a SOA Manifesto on Oct. 23, which sets out in 106 words the principles they feel are most important to the popular integration strategy. While some may think of SOA as something like Enterprise Architecture, and others, agile development, the SOA manifesto walks a middle road.

Several industry thought-leaders have signed the document, including Grady Booch, Toufic Boubez, Thomas Erl and Anne Thomas Manes.

The manifesto frames SOA as something that should focus on business objectives while remaining agile and interoperable. Some of the major priorities it lays out are:

• Business value over technical strategy
• Shared services over specific-purpose implementations
• Flexibility over optimization
• Evolutionary refinement over pursuit of initial perfection

This is all very reminiscent of the Agile Manifesto, which hit the scene in 2001. It sets forward a basic set choices between conflicting principals.

The lines in the sand have been drawn. What do you think? Leave us a comment.