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Roundtable Stresses SOA Integration
Java Pro Technology Roundtable participants recognize SOA, business processes, and workflow as key Java issues.
by Lee Sherman
JavaOne, June 29, 2004
Read the full-text transcripts of the Technology Roundtable: Part 1 and Part 2
Technology leaders gathered Monday afternoon at San Francisco's Palace Hotel for Java Pro's annual town hall-style debate over technology and business issues facing the Java community.
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| Java Pro Technology Roundtable (click on the image for details) |
Whereas past Java Pro Technology Roundtables felt like family arguments, focusing on how best to advance the Java platform with standards while still providing room for individual vendors to innovate, this year's event, perhaps in a sign of the Java platform's maturity, focused less on Java itself and more on how community members could best work to integrate Java with other enterprise development initiatives such as service-oriented architectures (SOAs). As for the tools themselves, all participants agreed that IDEs are becoming easier to use (though there is still room for improvement), client-side user interfaces are becoming richer, and frameworks are becoming more powerful.
FTP President Jim Fawcette introduced the event, and Sun Chief Technology Evangelist Simon Phipps served as moderator.
Roundtable participants represented key segments of the Java-related industry:
Mike Bechauf, VP, NetWeaver Standards, SAP
Mike Burba, OptimalJ Evangelist, Compuware
David Chappell, Chief Technology Evangelist, Sonic Software
Boz Elloy, Senior VP for software products, Borland Software
Ted Farrell, Director of Strategy, Application Development Tools Division, Oracle
Jeff Jackson, Java Developer Platform and Strategy, Sun Microsystems
Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse
Benjamin Renaud, Deputy CTO, BEA Systems
Steve Stover, CTO for development solutions, Quest Software
Jeff Cobb, Chief Scientist, Wily Technology
The changes taking place became evident when Phipps asked for opinions on the most significant development in the Java community today. Sonic Software's David Chappell immediately brought up the need to recognize the existence of service-oriented architectures, a card that wasn't even on the table when the group last met a year ago. "SOA is almost to the point of becoming a disruptive technology," he said. "I've seen that a lot of developers want to use Java as a way of both building new apps and integrating existing apps. Once those apps are deployed, how do you manage them effectively?"
BEA's Renaud agreed, saying that the Java community must begin thinking in terms of business processes and workflows, and must rally around emerging standards such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) that are complementary to Java, just as it has rallied around XML. SOAs provide a way of dealing with event-driven interactions.
"SOA for us translates to this idea that the tools need to go beyond just programs in isolation," said Wily Technology's Jeff Cobb. "There's much more pressure on the interaction with the rest of the ecosystem."
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