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.