In an effort to establish a common nomenclature for SOA, OASIS has created an SOA Reference Model (RM) technical committee. A group of vendors is also working to create an SOA Blueprints technical committee at OASIS. Formerly created by The Middleware Company, the Blueprints will leverage the RM to define a functional specification that vendors and end users can implement for real world SOA projects.

Before coming to OASIS, SOA Blueprints was an industry initiative led by Mountain View, Calif.-based The Middleware Company (TMC), in conjunction with a consortium of vendors and thought leaders in the enterprise Java market. Last November, when the research arm of TMC was discontinued, leading middleware providers and implementers formed a steering committee to determine the fate of SOA Blueprints.

"This steering committee served to coordinate customer opportunities and agreed to approach the WS-I [Web Services Interoperability Organization] and OASIS on the Blueprints," said Miko Matsumura, vice president of marketing at Cupertino, Calif.-based Infravio and leader of the SOA Blueprints group working on developing the OASIS technical committee. "It was determined that the WS-I was more focused on interoperability for existing specifications, and that OASIS was a better home."

"The Blueprints is a functional specification -- a literal blueprint from which implementations can, and will, be built," he said . "Ultimately, the Blueprints will rely on definitions built in to the reference model."

Read OASIS creates SOA reference model, adopts blueprints

These blueprints are more like executive briefings.

The SOA blueprint published by TMC last year had more development related detail, which included a petstore kind of stuff for an HR module.It was more in depth even touching the areas of process modelling.

Wish that intitative had been carried forward.

Regards
Surajeet

FYI, we at Microsoft have created a full implementation of the Generico blueprint application using .NET 1.1. The implementation can be download from MSDN at http://www.microsoft.com/connectedsystems. It's an interesting implementation in that the SO architecture allows any module to be swapped out for a J2EE module, and the application will still work via the web service architecture used. Also, it highlights the use of the MS Web Service Enhancement Toolkit (WSE) for the security subsystem in the specification, using the WS-Security standard for authentication and secure web service communication. For those intersted in .NET and service-orientation, and .NET/J2EE interoperability, it is worth checking out. Our implementation of the reference application (which was mostly specified by BEA) also includes a couple of new modules, including a smart-client interface to the backend from MS Office (all via the service controller layer, so interesting implementation to illustrate how Office can be used to integrate with backend J2EE or .NET web services), as well as device-based access (smart phone and PDA) via the .NET Compact Framework. Again the point is to show:

1) An end-to-end SOA application built using .NET
2) Using an architecture that allows any module to be constructed in either .NET and/or J2EE with complete interoperability between the two.

Finally, BizTalk is used for the workflow/business process management portion of the SOA Blueprint specification.

-Greg Leake
Microsoft Corporation

Hi, I'm trying to deploy Microsoft implementation of the Generico blueprints but I can't find the Biztalk server 2004 as required.When I used Biztalk server 2006 instead, some error occured with the other portion of the blueprints. Can u give me some links to dowload Biztalk Server 2004 ? I'm doing a thesis on J2EE and .NET interoperability and I think I need some help. Can I email to you for my question ?