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SOALink Alliance to Go One-on-One


Group will work to establish best practices for point integrations

By Edward J. Correia
June 1, 2006 — 
What is a service-oriented architecture? What’s the best way for two companies to connect their data systems as trading partners? As with many

of today’s technologies, the answers often vary depending on whom you ask.

To combat this problem, a group of companies has formed SOALink, an alliance to create a set of development practices for the integration of systems in this type of architecture.

“Use cases are more fine-grained than the specifications available,” asserted Miko Matsumura, vice president of technology at Infravio, which has spearheaded the effort. “So what we’re doing is getting customer requirements and using the standards to create best practices for interoperability.”

The group, which includes about a dozen integration and SOA tool makers, plans to use existing specifications and protocols to develop interoperability connections among them, he said. They will publish the methodologies on a Web site (www.soalink.com) at first on a peer-to-peer basis, but ultimately for anyone to see and use free of charge, Matsumura said. “It’s about sharing information about how we’re meeting customer requirements,” he added. The site also will offer whitepapers, presentations, Web-based seminars, news, information and blogs, he said.

But at least one company believes this approach may be flawed.

Joe Keller, vice president of SOA and integration platforms at Sun Microsystems, which is not part of the alliance, questioned the usefulness of developing such point-to-point connections. “What do those combinations give me? If you want to use Iona with Infravio, what are the things I am going to be able to do? What are the interoperability points they will work on?”

Keller pointed to the Java Business Integration specification (JSR 208) as helpful for defining underlying protocols that can be used for building point solutions, but asserted that there are not enough resources to build all the possible permutations.

“It’s not useless, but it’s expensive,” he said of the effort. “The thing to do is to get at the lower-level issues for interoperability; [to build a few] many-to-many relationships instead of many one-to-one relationships.”

SOALink’s initial members also include AmberPoint, Composite Software, Forum Systems, Intalio, Iona, JBoss, Layer Technologies, LogicBlaze, NetIQ, Parasoft, Reactivity, SOA Software, SymphonySoft, webMethods and WS02.

Why are IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun absent from the initiative? “We’re an open organization, and would be pleased to see members that represent large numbers of customers,” said Matsumura. “We intend to add vendors and will be announcing new ones as we go along.”

Keller said that to his knowledge, Sun has not yet been contacted. Of the effort, he said, “I salute the objective, [but] I am interested to find out what the actual method will be.”


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