The South East Asia SOA Weblog

Some would have us believe that consolidation is good for the IT industry. I find that kind of hard to stomach as it really means less choice for consumers at the end of the day. Interestingly there has been very little backlash over Oracle’s intent to purchase Sun. There is so much at stake with this acquisition for the IT industry and business not just Open Source. Sun currently controls several key technologies and Open Source products one of which is MySQL but others such as OpenSSO are also valuable contributions to the community. There is quite a long list… foremost on that list is Java. The industry needs a trustworthy custodian for Java. I really hope that we are getting that with Oracle (assuming the deal will be approved).I was amazed at how fast the US approved the deal. There probably should have been a lot more scrutiny on this as it does represent a large shift in the power structure around Java and other technologies. Sun have been a benevolent and kind force driving Java to where it is today.
So what will be left of Java and MySQL when the Sun goes down?

In my day I have used many and varied data integration products and approaches. Obviously all of the solutions have various strengths and weaknesses. We have recently started using Talend Open Studio for data integration(www.talend.com). The depth and breadth of this suite is incredible for open source. Talend it brings a whole new dimension to the solution space and rivals any commercial product suite. As with most data integration tools, Talend provides the ability to map the process from a diagram perspective down to the specific mappings and various adapters to accomplish ETL tasks. The design of the tool has been well thought through and resulted in the most flexible and powerful data integration tool set i have used. Talend also has a great capability for building jobs and deploying them as packages that can be run as autonomous Java or PERL and/or deployed as Axis Web Services (can be consumed by any ESB of course) or into the jBoss ESB.

Here is a shot of the debugging panel

In short, there is way to much to describe here. Check it out for yourself or consult with us for advice in deployment.

This is just to let readers of the blog know that IASA (International Association of Software Architects) Indonesia Chapter now has a mailing list operational on Yahoo Groups. As per my earlier post there is also a Facebook Group (intended for the social side). IASA Indonesia would like to use the Yahoo Group iasa_indo@yahoogroups.com for all mailing list communications. All of you practicing architects in Indonesia please feel free to join our chapter and enjoy the benefits.

The solutions now offered in Open Source for implementing SOA have begun to provide extensive value but customers and systems integrators should be cautious and think strategically when assessing the value of these solutions. Projects such as WS02 and semi-open source (non-GPL, non-BSD, non-Apache) solutions such as Intalio BPMS are now comparable and even superior to many or even all their closed source counterparts. Considering some of the open source licenses offered by vendors it is necessary to take a cautious and well informed approach to open source offerings. Many of these solutions are contrived contributions that do not have a strong 3rd party developer community and are principally developed by one vendor with the dubious goal of proliferating their software and gaining the mind-share of the broader developer community. In my opinion the strategic focus of customers seeking open source solutions should be on those open source vendors licensing completely open and community driven software licenses along with support and subscription based licensing. In general customers should be cautions of vendors offering so called open source or community editions and a so called closed source enterprise edition. Watch this space for updates.

Just letting any readers of the blog locally in Indonesia know that we have just set up a Facebook group for IASA (International Association of Software Architects) in Indonesia. The group name is “IASA - Indonesia Chapter” and it is a closed group for professional practicing IT architects in Indonesia. The IASA Indonesia web site will also be revised soon but presently can be found here http://www.iasahome.org/web/indonesia. If readers of the blog are interested in IASA membership then please contact either david.forden@iasahome.org or henry.chandra@iasahome.org. We are both practicing professional IT architects involved in the IASA.