SOA filling the Gaps

The bigest Software Vendors are continuosly bying other companies. The most recent acquisitions are BEA 's acquisition by Oracle and the anouncement that Sun Microsystems is going to aquire MySQL . As SOA is the main topic of this blog, I will focus on the first acquisition, which is related to SOA. MySQL acquisition process by Sun is not directly related to SOA. BEA is a long time target for acquisition: a technology leader with significant market share which is also significantly smaller than its competitors like IBM , Microsoft or Oracle. On January 18th 2004 I published an article in Hebrew titled: Why BEA will not be aquired by Microsoft? This article was a response to a Research Note by Yankee Group 's analyst Dana Gardner, which correctly described the acquisitions trend. However, I disagreed with the scenario of Microsoft bying BEA. My argument was that I am not sure if any of the bigger companies will aquire BEA, but if any company will aquire BEA, it will be Oracle a...

Is Software Problem Determination a Logical or Scientific process based on cause analysis and repeatable observation or is it a Zen style art, which has nothing to do with Western culture logic?    I asked myself this question few days ago while trying to find why Microsoft 's Office 2003 Word and Outlook stopped functioning. The answer is that maybe it is not Zen art training in which the user should experience unification of himself and the computer like the unification of the archer and the arch as a mean for hiting the target with an arrow in Zen Archery mastering. Surely, it has nothing to do with logical Problem-Determination.    My background is different from the background of a typical home Office user. In the 1970s and 1980s I was an MVS Systetms Programmer responsible for the operating system in a site with few thousands users. My responsibilities include maintaining changes to operating system components in the Object code format and source code form...

This post is the 5 th post in the "Web 2.0 for dummies" posts, based on my Web 2.0 presentation in a conference. After tasting Web 2.0 (part 2) and understanding what it is (part 4) we will drill down to more specific Web 2.0 principles and implementations. The origin of Mashups is in Music: Creating a new song by combining songs. In information technology Mashups are applications build by non-IT Professionals by combining together data or applications from different sources, which were not planned for integration together. The User assembles and links services to create an application The services could be data services or could include Business Logic functionality The user publishes the application in the Web so other users may use it or expand it as another Mashup . Technologies used for building a Mashup based on simple published API s include HTML , XML , simple Web Services and Representational State Transfer (REST). By using JavaScript or other scripting languag...