John O'Shea

The enterprise service bus (ESB) is, arguably, emerging as the preeminent platform for building, deploying, and managing Web services. However, once you have created and deployed your Web services, what's the next step? For many developers, it is the orchestration of those services into composite applications and business processes. In the past, this area has proved troublesome. The majority of existing business process tools are vendor specific and proprietary, using adapters and bridges to integrate with open platforms like Web services. However, the emergence of Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), coupled with the growth of Web services and the ESB, is providing a real, native, service-oriented architecture (SOA)?based alternative. This potential was brought home to me when I was working with a high-tech manufacturer who faced the perennial problem of ma... (more)