I’m starting to see a trend here. Its good to see that some of the larger platform vendors like IBM and Microsoft are “getting on the bus”. Here is another article on IBM’s intentions that I came across recently -
IBM Plans to release Enterprise Services Bus

In the article, ComputerWorld’s Pat Thibodeau notes analyst support of the ESB, highlighting Gartner’s support and referencing IDC’s March report calling ESBs a “disruptive technology.” I think its cool because Sonic got a mention in the article, and Jon Johnson at Northrup Grumman (a Sonic customer) is also included as an adopter of ESB technology that exists today.

webMethods, although a much smaller player, has href=http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/031029/dcw011_1.html>announced similar intentions to release an ESB. I was kind of hoping that they would start using that terminology.

Microsoft has announced “Indigo”, which from what I can tell, combines messaging, Web services, and SOA. Sounds like an ESB to me.

Here are some of the descriptions of the Indigo sessions from the “sold out” PDC that is going on right now -

“See how to build next generation “Indigo” Message Bus Web service endpoints within ASP.NET Web applications. Learn how you can now receive and process Web service requests on non-http protocols (and how you can extend this to add your own), how you can integrate Web services with ASP.NET caching services, and build integrated Web applications that expose both UI and data functionality.”

“Indigo is Microsoft’s programming model and framework for building connected applications and Web services. “Indigo” brings together the best of .NET Remoting, MSMQ, ASMX and .NET Enterprise Services to form a unified model and runtime for building connected applications on the Windows platform”

“Indigo is Microsoft’s programming model and framework for building connected applications and Web services, and is built on top of the WS protocols, a suite of specifications that will power the next phase of the Internet, much like TCP and HTTP powered the Web we have today. Learn about the architecture behind this protocol framework, and drill into the specifications: Security, Transaction, Reliable Messaging, Addressing, and Policy.”

In John Fontana’s Network World writeup of Gates’ keynote speech at the Microsoft PDC, he uses the words “…a Web services
communication bus built into the OS” to describe Indigo.

eWeek’s Darryl Taft’s writes about it here

Here is an excerpt from the article about timeframes for the release of Indigo -
“According to sources close to the company, the first beta of Indigo will not be available until the middle of next year, with actual delivery coming in the Longhorn timeframe of late 2005 or later. ”

Also noted in Darryl’s article is Indigo’s “multiplatform” approach - “In addition, Microsoft is promoting a multiplatform vision through Indigo—multiplatform as in multi-Microsoft platform. The idea is that developers will be able to write a single code set in Indigo and it will
be able to run on a variety of different user environments, such as mobile devices, remote access devices or distributed out to clients, sources close to Microsoft said.”

Most of the press I have seen about the announcements being made at Microsoft’s PDC are focusing on Longhorn and Whidbey. I’m not surprised that the desktop O/S environment and their enhancements around VS, C#, and CLR would take center stage over middleware infrastructure fabric in their fanfare. That’s been their bread and butter for so long, and where they get the most attention. But you don’t have to go too far to find something that looks like an ESB, at least in the way that they seem to be combining messaging and Web services. I would guess that the rest of the ESB-like functionality may be better suited for inclusion in Biztalk.

All are competition for Sonic, but healthy competition. You can’t have a technology trend with only one vendor :) This phenonmenon of messaging and reliable Web services helps to promote cross-vendor interoperability when everyone shares a similar model of asynchronous loosely coupled communication.

That ESB book idea is sounding better every day.

Dave

Related link: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/offers/WS-Specworkshops/ws-pwrmfest1.html

IBM has published the results of the latest WS-ReliableMessaging Interop fest. The publishing of the results is something that the legal agreement allows the spec authors to do.

The interop participants included -
BEA Systems, Inc
Blue Titan Software, Inc.
IBM Corporation
Microsoft Corporation
NEC Laboratories America, Inc.
Sonic Software Corporation
Systinet Corp.
TIBCO Software, Inc.

The results, as written in the public report, exceeded expectations. We actually finished early.

A new Yahoo! groups discussion forum has been established. IBM’s Dug Davis has also extended an invitation to multiple places, including the SOAPBuilders Interoperability group. The new WS-ReliableMessaging discussion forum is a private list, but anyone can join provided they sign a legal agreement that basically says anything you contribute to the list becomes donated to the spec authors on a royalty free basis.

The participating companies are in the process of putting up a list of publicly available WS-ReliableMessaging endpoints so that we can continue our testing without necessarily having to sit in the same room. The endpoints are referenced here, and will be updated as more of us get our endpoints out there.

Dave

I recently attended the WS-ReliableMessaging Interop Summit, hosted by IBM. The agreement prohibits me from saying anything about the specific results due in part to the workshop allowing for vendors to arrive with “pre-release code”. A public version of the agreement and the test scenario document can be found here.

The way the workshop works is all the vendors sit in a room and fire messages at each other. The test scenario, as outlined in the publicly available test scenario document, is relatively simple. Its a simple ping test of sending 3 sequenced messages to another WS-ReliableMessaging enabled endpoint. The receiving endpoint responds with an acknowledgement message that contains the range of message sequence numbers that it received. That’s it. Sounds simple, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. You have to start somewhere.

Glen Daniels (now a Sonic guy) brought an implementation that he had written using Axis handlers. The question now is whether we just submit the implementation to Axis, productize it in Sonic, or both. My gut feel tells me that we should do both, and that productizing it in Sonic would yield a more robust implementation because there is already a reliable messaging infrastructure there to take advantage of. There’s a whole team of engineers back at Sonic HQ that will be happy to remind me that there’s much more to doing a reliable messaging infrastructure than a simple message exchange pattern in an Axis handler. And Glen would be the first to agree. Perhaps in the end we’ll do both.

[FYI - 10/23/2003 IBM recently published notes on the meeting]

Dave

Related link: http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Programming/linkupdate…

Link value is a huge topic, with many parameters that are difficult to quantify, but one key component is easy to quantify: link validity. Does the link go where it’s supposed to? Does it go anywhere? The answers to these questions say a lot about its value.

Years ago I prototyped a link management system in which all the links in a document passed the destination URL to a CGI that looked up the passed URL in a relational database to see if it was still valid before sending the user’s browser on to the URL. If the link was no longer valid, it could display a message about the approximate time frame in which it became invalid by listing the last date it was valid and the first date that it was invalid. These dates were assigned by a batch process that ran through the links in the database and rechecked their validity by sending an HTTP HEAD request (which, unlike GET, only asks for the requested document’s HTTP header instead of getting the whole document) to each and saving a time-stamped code showing the response in the database. (By the way, as long as there’s a row in the table for each link, it’s a great place to store other link metadata as well.)

Dr. Matthias Laux, a Sun employee in Walldorf, Germany, has a similar idea, although his is less concerned with runtime checking of link traversal than with maintaining bookmark collections. He, too, is checking for link validity and storing the timestamped results in a relational database. He’s written some Java classes to implement his idea and they’re available for download.

What lengths have you heard of web or other hypertext systems going to in order to prevent users from following bad links?

I’m off to day 1 of the WS-ReliableMessaging Interop Summit. Its being held at the IBM site at Research Triangle Park in Raleigh-Durham.

I flew in last night and had dinner with some Microsoft folks, Colleen Evans and Jorgen Thelin. Colleen is a former Sonic colleague and Jorgen is formerly of Cape Clear. Jorgen says he has “the jacket” that Becky Dias promised me.

The confidentiality agreement prevents anyone from disclosing the results of the testing in order to cut the vendors some slack with regard to the maturity of the pre-production implementations they may be bringing to the table. Hopefully there will be other things that I can talk about beyond test results.

Dave

Related link: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/031013/nym082a_1.html

I’m happy for Graham. This gives him a new playground to play in (webM). My guess is that it will take some time and effort to actually combine the technology so that its integrated for real, assuming that’s what they really intend to do. We just finished stage 2 of that process with the eXcelon acquisition that we did about a year ago. The initial integration can be almost instantaneous, because its all standards based, right? However, it takes some time to integrate the incumbent technology with the new stuff in terms of making the coherent experience for the user that doesn’t leave you feeling like you’re using two separate products.

Actually, webM isn’t really “the first” to have a highly distributed standards based integration fabric. The ESB has been providing a “100% standards based” integration fabric for a couple of years now. I’m happy to see other vendors recognizing the need and sharing a vision for a highly distributed integration fabric. A highly distributed integration fabric containing a robust management infrastructure is at the core of the emerging Enterprise Service Bus technology trend. Sonic would like to see Graham and webMethods “get on the bus”.

I run into Graham quite a bit at speaking venues. I had spoken with him about adopting the ESB terminology several months ago. He wasn’t too keen on it largely due to at the time that 1)The definition of ESB requires messaging as part of the core requirement. 2) None of the major vendors had gotten “on the bus” so to speak. Since then IBM has started adopting the term ESB. Perhaps he should revisit issue #1.

Dave

Related link: