SOA Blueprints, started by BEA and The Middleware Company, today announced broad industry support for a new 0.5 public review release available immediately. SOA Blueprints announced support from 21 companies and provides roadmap for how individuals and organizations intend to commit.

SOA Blueprints is a set of best practices for developing applications that use service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA includes principles and practices for sharing, reusing and orchestrating business logic represented as services or components. SOA Blueprints contains an open specification, third-party expert validation, and implementations using multiple technologies. Today’s release is the second public draft, available for review at SOABlueprints.com.

SOA Blueprints has received support from BEA, HP, Iona, Microsoft, Oracle, Rogue Wave Software, SAP, Sun Microsystems, The Middleware Company, VERITAS Software and several other companies, that may engage in three ways:

   1. By providing a best practice implementation of the SOA Blueprints specification (BEA Systems, Iona, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, The Middleware Company, Pramati, Diamelle Technologies, Rogue Wave Software)

   2. By leading the formulation of best practices not currently described by SOA Blueprints (Borland, HP, VERITAS Software, 7irene, E2E Consulting, MindReef, PushToTest)

   3. By contributing to the expert group or through ecosystem development (Arjuna Technologies, GrandCentral Communications, SAP, Truelink, WestGlobal, Xede)

“The momentum and support around SOA Blueprints has exceeded our expectations,” said Salil Deshpande, CEO of The Middleware Company “Since its launch in May there have been more than 30,000 downloads and 9 commitments to build comparable implementations using various technology such as J2EE, .NET and open source. This effort includes individuals, consulting companies and large software vendors working non-politically together to achieve a common goal. We continue to be excited by the interest and progress we are seeing.”

See the updated site.
See the press release.
See quotes from industry leaders.

IBM,Macromedia,JBoss ..are they not excited about SOA?..

IBM,Macromedia,JBoss ..are they not excited about SOA?

Surajeet,

These particular companies (BEA, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, IONA, Pramati, Diamelle, Rogue Wave) are the ones who have committed to us, in writing, as of today, to create an implementation of The Middleware Company’s SOA Blueprints specification. Other companies are adding value in other ways as described in the release. Many of these companies approached us instead of vice versa, after we originally announced SOA Blueprints a couple of months ago. We are of course hoping that more companies will create implementations also. By examining best-practices implementations of a typical customer scenario – the same customer scenario – created using each technology vendor’s stack, we will all learn a lot.

Many of us will be attending JavaOne this week and may be online only sporadically, but we’ll catch up with other questions later.

Salil Deshpande
The Middleware Company

Why do we need blueprints for SOA (Same Old Architecture) these days ?
This would be the same as somebody needs a blueprint for OO development or ER design. There are tons of books and articles about it out there, but it is not called SOA (Stupid Overhyped Acronim) though.

MC

Why do we need blueprints for SOA (Same Old Architecture) these days?

Mileta,

Keep in mind that so far you are only seeing Part One of SOA Blueprints – a functional and behavioral specification of several applications used in GeneriCo, a fictitious business entity. Part Two will be when all the supporting technology vendors create best-practices implementations of SOA Blueprints using their own technology, which as you can see, several vendors have committed to doing. Not only will we have a common vocabulary to debate and discuss SOAs, but we will also have multiple implementations using different technology sets, to compare approaches, recommendations, prescriptions, and features.

Salil Deshpande
The Middleware Company

<!--Why do we need blueprints for SOA (Same Old Architecture) these days?-->

Mileta to make IT market agile we need a buzz every six month, don't worry it is good for those of us who are in IT business...-)SOA rocks just like XML, Web Services, SOAP and yada yada yada...

Buzz or not, didn't you find any benefit in using one of those technologies?

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Yes, now I know how is the weather in your town:-) you know what I mean...

I don't want to sound too critical and I certainly hope that this initiative can produce something valuable and worthwhile. But it seems to me that the more big vendors get involved in this sort of venture, the more the outcome is just a "lowest common denominator" that satisfies all the participant's vested interests and egos, but doesn't actually solve the customer's problems.

If everyone is working together to solve some clearly established problem, then the result is likely to be far more useful than everyone "working together" but actually just playing politics for their own end.

I hope this isn't the case here.

Regards
Kit

But it seems to me that the more big vendors get involved in this sort of venture, the more the outcome is just a "lowest common denominator" that satisfies all the participant's vested interests and egos, but doesn't actually solve the customer's problems.

True. thats why we have Apache :)it has solutions for everything.

let the big guys spend thier time in finding a solution to thier egos...not long,when they will realize thier own fault.

If everyone is working together to solve some clearly established problem, then the result is likely to be far more useful than everyone "working together" but actually just playing politics for their own end.I hope this isn't the case here.

Kit,

Yes, indeed. In this case the clearly defined problem is to implement the specific applications that are well described in The Middleware Company's 140-page SOA Blueprints specification. The vendors mentioned in the release have committed to doing so. That is what makes this effort and announcement different from other such “we pledge to work together” releases you may have seen.

Salil Deshpande
The Middleware Company

Hi Salil,

Glad to hear it! I do really hope this gets done right because it is significant stuff. I hope it turns out better than the BPM world where the leading big-vendor-backed standard, BPEL, has ended up as a bit of a camel, IMO ("a horse designed by a committee").

Good luck.

Kit

Is IBM not at all active in this initiative ?
If so Why not?

Are they forcing MQ to hard ??

/Peter N

I don't consider myself an expert on this. It looks like the
old J2EE service/domain layered architecture with lots of messaging
thrown in. Also I can add web service interfaces to the service layer.
 I'm a bit dissapointed at the bottom up approach
to the entity/domain database aspect. Sooo, Is SOA abandoning
the O/R mapping and the top down best practice? Is it trying
to start with entity/data model relational design, instead of
the OO design? If so, is this to support portlets? Or is the
best practice being abandoned so folks won't have to change
in order to improve the OO design and avoid a data-centric application?