SOA Tech Magazine

I've just literally arrived from Oracle Open World and JavaOne 2017 and my head still hurts with so many interesting announcements and cool new things I want to get my hands on and learn. This blogpost provides a short summary of my impressions and key takeaways from both events. General overview: This year OOW and JavaOne was full of changes from previous ones. For starting most of the sessions took place between Moscone South, Moscone West and the Marriot Marquis, as opposed to all over the place. I understand that this was mainly due to renovations that took place in Moscone which meant that more rooms were available. JavaOne this year took place in Moscone West (as opposed to Hilton Union Square). First thing that really stroke me was the vast amount of people that seemed to have attended the event (see below tweet from Adam Bien ). Not sure if more people attended JavaOne than OOW, but my first observation is that sessions in JavaOne were better attended than those in OO...

As cloud adoption continues to rise, the so called ' second wave ' of cloud computing becomes less of a prediction and rather a reality we have to deal with. In the past 2 years or so for example, almost in every customer engagement I've had, 'the cloud' has been at the very least a topic of discussion. In most cases it has actually been within the scope of our activities. This is not surprising of course as the term 'cloud' itself can mean ten different things to ten different people. The sad part is though, that is has been years since the first wave of cloud (started by Amazon) and there's still a fair degree of confusion in the topic. In fact, I still often refer to the  NIST definition of cloud  to explain what cloud computing and PaaS actually is and how traditional on-premises middleware installed on IaaS isn't PaaS or iPaaS. This is in fact one of the main motivators of this post. iPaaS The term Integration Platform as a Service , or ...

As SaaS adoption continue to increase in organisations of any size, it's only expected that different cloud vendors will stretch their cloud capabilities to try and increase their SaaS/PaaS/IaaS footprints in a clients landscape. This is particularly true for iPaaS related capabilities, as it seems that every cloud vendor has its own related offering and they are pushing it really hard to customers even if there really isn't a one to one fit. The challenge is though, that organisations that don't carefully elaborate a cloud integration strategy and properly think this through, will almost certainly end up implementing point solutions using whichever iPaaS capability is available for the individual project.  This not only results in vendor lock-in but also increases the complexity and cost of integration. To avoid this, the first step is to of course create a carefully thought cloud integration strategy with a clear objective in mind. This should be delivering a plat...

There is no doubt that web [Rest] APIs have become extremely popular and its usage has gone well beyond just building APIs in support of mobile apps. We can see the adoption of  resource-oriented architectures (ROA)  by probably all SaaS vendors who provide out-of-the-box APIs as the means to connect and interact with their cloud applications. Take for example the Oracle Cloud . To discover and consume publicly available Oracle SaaS APIs, all one need to do is browse the  Oracle API Catalog Cloud Service  (which is publicly accessible) and just select the  Swagger definition for any given API. But (as you probably already know) the adoption of web APIs hasn't stopped there.  With the increased popularity of Microservice Architectures  , initiatives such as  Open Legacy  ,  and node.js based frameworks like loopback and sails (to name a few), API-enabling system of records is becoming a lot easier. This is putting a lot of pres...