lustratus LiteBytes

I was interested in BEA’s new 360 degree SOA architecture and offerings,…

…announced here. The announcement looks impressive – or at least, the pictures do. But there does not appear to be too much detail at the moment. One thing that worries me is that while it is great to have a 360 degree solution, this may still only cover two dimensions – ie one layer of the problem. BEA points out the new approach brings together Tuxedo, WebLogic and AquaLogic environments…and ‘third-party’.

But the only details available are for the BEA layer of the problem. It insists, for instance, that the new microService architecture is used (mSA) as the SOA backbone, which is built around a publish-subscribe, event-driven model of operations – not much good if you want to use the Request/Reply model. Most of the components seem to require a WebLogic application server environment to run. But what happens when third-party products are present and need to be involved? Does WebLogic need to be installed everywhere? What happens in a mixed WebLogic / WebSphere environment for instance? What about proprietary environments like mainframes?

It appears to me, from the small amount of detail available, that the focus is on the BEA slice of the problem without much consideration for other layers. For that reason, I would claim the solution is limited in its attractiveness, at least until additional details concerning third party environments and alternative SOA implementation models appear.

Steve