TheServerSide Symposium Las Vegas

I attended TheServerSide Symposium in Las Vegas last week. I participated in an export panel on SOA. The panel was video taped and so I hope to post a link to that panel when it becomes available. The panel changed from advertised with Venkat Subramaniam (Agile Techologies), Neal Ford (ThoughtWorks), and Mark Richards (IBM) joining late when Eugene Ciurana (WalMart) dropped out.

We discussed the role of various technologies including ESBs and registries/repositories, we talked about SOA testing, best practices and use cases etc. I thought it went very well.

I was interested in Ross Manson's Mule & Spring talk. What I found most interesting is how Spring and Mule are maturing and therefore having to deal with enterprise class problems. It was like going back in time 10 years to an OMG CORBA event with people asking about high availability and other enterprise features. All middleware and container technologies go through the same cycle - cool "Hello World" type demo, add extra powerful features, hit the complexity of enterprise computing. The biggest challenge is trying to keep the "simple" technology simple as you layer on the extra functionality. Distributed SOA infrastructure manages to get complex as you try to continue to scale it. High availability wasn't something on offer with Mule ... yet.

IONA's Celtix Enterprise integrates with Mule and also contains Spring as a container for POJO type services. William Tam (IONA) showed me a really cool mash-up demo using Celtix with Spring and Mule. It involved a company tracking trucks through a city ... and of course it used the Google Maps API. I have it installed on my Mac and hope to play with it again soon. I hope someone can host this - perhaps I will. I'll let you know.