It has been a long time since I have had the opportunity to work with a product that effectively provides me with a relatively bare bones server container. By bare bones, I mean a product that gives me a basic server infrastructure to handle the "hard" server code stuff like thread maintenance, network sockets, and protocols, but leaves me free to implement business logic more or less any way I want. True, I have to hook into the server API at points but those are minimal. Last time I got to work with such an environment was working with the Sybase Open Server product which I admit was fun.
Then it seemed that the application server market grew up to embrace various standards starting with CORBA and embracing Java. Java gave use J2EE, JMS, and ultimately paved the path to web services and SOA. Now when you think about working with an application server you not only get the "bare bones" server capabilities but a whole slew of standards to code with which makes deployment and integration much easier than a totally custom environment.
So that is the lead up to the content of this news item. I believe that a good story will be what working with the IONA Artix product (http://www.iona.com/products/artix/) will teach me in this day and age of application servers supporting multiple standards. To be fair, Artix supports lots of web services related standards and does it well. Some of the =things I hope to learn are:
- how you implement business logic components as Artix plug-ins and how that will compare to EJBs.
- how much coding will I need to do for business logic orchestration versus using something like BPEL.
- how will I implement security using Artix versus using something like the web services manager that is part of the Oracle SOA suite
- Is there an advantage in productivity via a code environment (Artix) to supplement XSL transformations using in-line code versus calling code via a BPEL process.
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