Open Source
Today, SOA and ESB is an area where there is maximum hype and minimum understanding regarding how the holistic model will be designed and implemented. In larger organizations, the enterprise architects may be planning to move to IBM or BEA in the future, but they are still in there own product evaluation and learning phases. Therefore, enterprising technologies within the organization are building a case for implementing "interim" custom solutions by wrapping Spring services or using other open source technologies, such as, IONA's Celtix, an open source ESB.
IONA's model is to give away its software and sell its professional services to "help organizations take advantage of open source and to ensure the successful adoption of SOA." While technologies like Spring and IONA represent the nuts and bolts of an SOA, companies such as Savvion are providing free copies of there Process Modeler. The tool provides model simulation and functionality for collaboratively building executable business processes. SOA is clearly not a packaged environment and one way or another an organization will have to assemble a certain amount of technologies and technical expertise to pull it off.
The OASIS SOA technical committees focus on creating standards to help interoperability for industry computing environments. OASIS doesn't provide a "how to" for developing the whole enterprise system from beginning to end. Each organization has to decide and tailor the appropriate software methodology for its purposes.
The OASIS SOA TC will develop a Reference Model. This is primarily to address SOA being used as a term in an increasing number of contexts and specific technology implementations. Sometimes, the term is used with differing--or worse, conflicting--understandings of implicit terminology and components. This Reference Model is being developed to encourage the continued growth of different and specialized SOA implementations while preserving a common layer of understanding about what SOA is.
