SAP has been talking up their suite of SOA tools. The names all run together a bit, since they each contain some permutation of "enterprise" and "builder", but it's a very impressive set of tools. Everything SAP does comes off of an enterprise service repository (ESR). This includes a UDDI registry, and it supports service discovery and lookup. Development tools allow developers to search and discover services through their "ES Workspace".

I am not a language designer, nor a researcher in type systems. My concerns are purely pragmatic. I want usable languages, ones where doing the easy thing also happens to be doing the right thing. Even today, I see a lot of code that handles exceptions poorly (whether checked or unchecked!). Even after 13 years and some trillion words of books, most Java developers barely understand when to synchronize code. (And, by the way, I now believe that there's only one book on concurrency you actually need.

One of the frequently asked questions at the No Fluff, Just Stuff expert panels boils down to, "When should I get off the Java train?" There may be good money out there for the last living COBOL programmer, but most of the Java developers we see still have a lot of years left in their careers, too many to plan on riding Java off into it's sunset. Most of the panelists talk about the long future ahead of Java the Platform, no matter what happens with Java the Language.

Matthias Schorer talked about FIDUCIA IT AG and their service-oriented architecture. This financial services provider works with 780 banks in Europe, processing 35,000,000 transactions during the banking day. That works out to a little over 3.5 million transactions per hour. Matthias described this as a service-oriented architecture, and it is. Be warned, however, that SOA does not imply or require web services. The services here exist in the middle tier. Instead of speaking XML, they mainly use serialized Java objects.

Part of Sun's push behind JavaFX will be called "Project Hydrazine".  (Hydrazine is a toxic and volatile rocket fuel.)  This is still a bit fuzzy, and they only left the boxes-and-arrows slide up for a few seconds, but here's what I was able to glean. Hydrazine includes common federated services for discovery, personalization, deployment, location, and development. There's a "cloud" component to it, which wasn't entirely clear from their presentation. Overall, the goal appears to be an easier model for creating end-user applications based on a service component architecture.

What happens to the revolutionaries, once they've won? It's been about ten years since I last made the pilgramage to JavaOne, back when Java was still being called an  "emerging technology". Many things have changed since then. Java is now so mainstream that the early adopters are getting itchy feet and looking hard for the next big thing. (The current favorite is some flavor of dynamic language running on the JVM: Groovy, Scala, JRuby, Jython, etc.

Yesterday, I let myself get optimistic about what Jonathan Schwartz coyly hinted about over the weekend. The actual announcement came today.  OpenSolaris will be available on EC2. Honestly, I'm not sure how relevant that is. Are people actually demanding Solaris before they'll support EC2? There is a message here for Microsoft, though. The only sensible license cost for a cloud-based platform is $0.00 per instance.  Addendum I said that OpenSolaris would be available on EC2.

Nobody can miss the dramatic proliferation of cloud computing platforms and initiatives over the last couple of years. All through the last year, Sun has remained oddly silent on the whole thing. There is a clear, natural synergy between Linux, commodity x86 hardware, and cloud computing. Sun is conspicuously absent from all of those markets.  Sun clearly needs to regain relevance in this space. On the one hand, Project Caroline now has its own website.

On June 26-28, 2008, I'll be speaking at the inagural Agile IT! Experience symposium in Reston, VA. Agile ITX is about consistently delivering better software. It's for development teams and management, working and learning together. It's a production of the No Fluff, Just Stuff symposium series.  Like all NFJS events, attendance is capped, so be sure to register early. From the announcement email: The central theme of the Agile ITX conference (www.

Amazon must have been burning more midnight oil than usual lately. Within the last two weeks, they've announced three new features that basically eliminate any remaining objections to their AWS computing platform. Elastic IP Addresses Elastic IP addresses solve a major problem on the front end.  When an EC2 instance boots up, the "cloud" assigns it a random IP address. (Technically, it assigns two: one external and one internal.  For now, I'm only talking about the external IP.