Can SOA Close the Gap Between Integration and Development?

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February 24, 2007

Can SOA Close the Gap Between Integration and Development?

SOA is stirring seismic shifts in the integration market. Is the need for a lifecycle approach to building, deploying and managing services pushing integration vendors toward developers, and visa versa? Recent announcements by integration stalwarts TIBCO and webMethods -- not to mention BEA and IBM -- would seem to point to an increasing convergence. These points were explored by participants in Dana Gardner's latest SOA BriefingsDirect podcast. I had the opportunity to join Dana, along with analysts Steve Garone, Neil Ward-Dutton, and Jim Kobielus (summarized and linked here).

As Niel Ward-Dutton observes, TIBCO's latest announcement of AcitiveMatrix is much more of a development infrastructure focus than an integration infrastructure focus. "I was really kind of taken by surprise. It took me a while to really get my head around it, because what TIBCO is doing with ActiveMatrix is shifting beyond its traditional integration focus and providing a rear container for the development and deployment of services, which is subtly different and not what TIBCO has historically done."

Steve Garone, however, says that TIBCO's reaching out to developers may be more of an evolutionary than revolutionary step. "This is a logical extension of what companies like TIBCO have done in the past in terms of integration and messaging," he pointed out. "However, it does have advantages for developers who need to develop applications that use those capabilities by abstracting out some of the work that they need to do for that integration. This raises that level of abstraction to eliminate a lot of the work developers have to do in terms of coding to a specific ESB or to a specific integration standard, and lets them focus on developing the code they need to make their applications work."

Dana pointed out that webMethods, with the release of Fabric 7.0, also now provides development capabilities. Jim Kobielus agreed, noting that Fabric 7.0 is similar to TIBCO's ActiveMatrix in that "it's a strong development story and a strong virtualization story. In the case of webMethods Fabric 7.0, you can develop complex-end-to-end integration process logic in a high-level abstraction. It’s a very virtualized ESB/SOA development environment with a strong BPMN angle to it and a very strong metadata infrastructure. WebMethods recently acquired Infravio, and so webMethods is very deep now both on the UDDI registry side and providing the plumbing for a federated metadata infrastructure that’s necessary for truly platform agnostic ESB and SOA applications."

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