May 10th, 2007
Survey: open source makes a difference for SOA
There are 144,000 open source projects going on out there. The odds are pretty good that at least some will help make SOAs easier to build.
More and more, open source and SOA are proving to be a powerful duo. This is a message that is reaching the enterprise in a big way as well. A new survey conducted by Forrester Research and underwritten by Unisys finds that most executives see open source as the best way to get moving on both SOA and integration initiatives.
Seventy-one percent of 400 executives viewed open-source software as "important" or "very important" for consolidating IT infrastructure. In addition, 57% of respondents characterized open source as important or very important for facilitating the migration to a SOA. At the core of these responses is SOA's ability to extend the life of legacy applications. Forrester also said that 78% of respondents were favorably disposed toward open source software because of its open standards, which is a major factor driving their view of its value for SOA next-generation enterprise architectures.
However, while there tens of thousands of open source projects out there, some open source applications are better than others. In this new article, Rod Cope identifies several open source solutions that make sense when doing SOA and integration work:
- ActiveMQ: ActiveMQ "is the most popular and powerful open source Message Broker," Rod writes. "Although not quite a full-blown SOA solution, its flexible messaging technology is required for any SOA implementation."
- ServiceMix: ServiceMix provides an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that combines the functionality of SOA and an Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), Rod observes.
- XFire (for Web services): "XFire is a Web Services framework that allows developers to create and/or consume Web Services. Given its simplicity of use and built-in testing tools, it makes short work of Web Servicesby effectively eliminating the manual labor of generating WSDL and other artifacts of SOAP."
- Axis2 (for Web services): Axis2 is similar in function to XFire, supporting SOAP and other standards. But it also has integrated support for the Representational State Transfer (REST) style of Web services as well, Rod observes.
Joe McKendrick is an author and consultant with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in the technology industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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