Rourke on SOA

I’m in Orlando this week at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit as part of TIBCO Software’s launch of TIBCO ActiveMatrix. Our booth has been mobbed with people asking questions about ActiveMatrix and Service Virtualization. Response to this new technology has been very positive, though there has been some confusion. Explaining what ActiveMatrix does in 90 seconds isn’t easy, but we (in the booth) have all gotten better at it in the course of the last day.

Most of the initial questions have been about ActiveMatrix, but TIBCO’s award winning General Interface product has also generated a lot of excitement. The RIA (rich Internet applications) space is hot right now, and UI level products definitely demo better than middleware products. The picture at the bottom of this post shows the size of the crowd around the product manager for General Interface — that was typical during show floor hours yesterday.

Who’s talking about ActiveMatrix so far? InfoWorld was first out of the gate with a short article yesterday.

Antone Gonsalves published article in InformationWeek today. His article focuses on the fact that ActiveMatrix Service Grid removed the need to write transport code to interconnect services. Antone is right, Service Virtualization eliminates the need to write transport code and therefore allows you to go back to focusing on writing your application. The parts of your application simply work together as one applications. At first glance, at a high level, this smells like an ESB. ActiveMatrix Service Grid is not an ESB. Note this section of the article where Anotone quotes ZapThink:

“The challenge Tibco will face is that a middleware approach to SOA will fundamentally be challenged by the problem that has always plagued middleware approaches to dealing with heterogeneity: over time, companies implement multiple different containers, middleware approaches, and other technology systems for dealing with change,” Schmelzer said. As a result, companies could end up deploying middleware for their middleware, which could reintroduce more complexity.

It sounds like ZapThink is talking about the proliferation of ESB technologies in large companies. I disagree with the quote, but I disagree even more with the implication that ActiveMatrix is an ESB — ActiveMatrix Service Grid is not an ESB. ActiveMatrix Service Grid is a new container (or grid of containers) that allows heterogeneous services to live together and communicate seamlessly. If companies adopt multiple such technologies they will still be in a much better situation than they are today. Yes, they’ll need to connect the different “grids” together, but that isn’t so hard because AM Service Grid is built to be easy to connect to other systems. Other such platforms, when they appear, will likely also be easy to interconnect.

Better still, ActiveMatrix is built on standards. One of those standards, JBI, specifically addresses the issue of interoperability. As long as other vendors comply with the JBI standard then we should be able to interconnect multiple such “grids”.

As far as the issue of multiple ESBs in large enterprises is concerned, I agree with Gartner. Several key analysts with Gartner have come out recommending use of an “enterprise” level ESB as the master “bus” in your enterprise architecture (for more detail, consult your Gartner contact). Connecting local ESBs from different vendors to that main, enterprise ESB is going to be much easier than connecting things like ERP systems and mainframe systems to an ESB in the first place.

(Disclaimer: As indicated at the beginning of this article, I am employed by TIBCO Software, Inc. , the company that just released this product. Further, this article was written and published without the approval or explicit knowledge of TIBCO Software, Inc. )