I’m pretty excited about the recent release of JAX-WS 2.1. The 2.1 build is a complete re-architecture aimed at performance and extensibility and the JAX-WS team has been working on it for nearly a year. They have FINALLY shed the old JAX-RPC skin and done a full redesign. The new release also includes WS-Addressing support and JAXB 2.1 support.

I’m also very interested in the on-going work on the Eclipse SOA Tools Project (STP). I haven’t gotten an opportunity to play with it yet, but it looks to be pretty extensive. I also like that it is built around JAX-WS.

As SOA increases in maturity and we understand it better, inevitably we develop standards and common design strategies. One such design strategy that I am closing monitoring is the evolution of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). In particular, I am interested in the potential development of a standardized SOA middleware framework framework that can be implemented by multiple vendors to supporting portable process definition, component/service assembly, mediation logic, messaging, and a data service layer.

OSOA seems to be making some considerable headway on Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO). OASIS has certainly cornered the business process / service orchestration side of things with the Business Process Execution Language [which evidentally now is shunning the all upper-case (BPEL) acronym in favor of the much stranger looking (BPel) case]. This still leaves me wanting to see some standardization in mediation logic and messaging. I hope that Chappell and friends will pick up the ball with Synapse and run with it, but it doesn’t appear to be moving especially fast right now. Until then, or until another initiative comes along, I guess I’ll just have to settle for vendor lock-in on the messaging / mediation middle-tier.

I got my acceptance e-mail from SYS-CON for the SOAWorld 2007 event in New York City. I’ll be presenting “Service-Oriented Patterns and Anti-Patterns.”

I have been observing and scoffing at the whole “Web 2.0″ and blog-fever for a couple of years now. I have finally succumbed to the gravity of the interactive web and set up a blog. I feel rather like my father when, in the early 90s, he finally broke down and bought an answering machine. You see, he was famous for the statement “I don’t want to talk to a machine…nobody else does either.” At any rate. I’ve shaved me head, drunk the kool-aid, and joined the ranks of the blogging elite. Woo-hoo!!!