I’m very much looking forward to the SOA track at QCon, the conferences organized by JAOO and InfoQ, which takes place in San Francisco in November. I am “hosting” the track, which essentially means that I picked the topic, invited the speakers, and will talk for 15 minutes in exchange for being able to have a lot of fun in San Francisco :-)

We have been able to get an exceptionally great list of speakers for the SOA track (the topic is “Connecting SOA and the Web: How much REST do we need?”):

• Steve Vinoski, former CORBA Guru #1 at IONA, will introduce the REST concept for those familiar with SOA (“REST Eye for the SOA Guy”). See his blog entry
• Sanjiva Weerawarana, CEO of WSO2, will explain what he considers the real truth behind the WS-* vs. REST discussion (“WS-* vs. REST: Mashing up the Truth from Facts, Myths and Lies”)
• Burton Group analyst Pete Lacey will counter Sanjiva’s talk by showing how REST is suitable for big bad enterprise scenarios (“Code Talks: Demonstrating the ‘ilities’ of REST”)
• XFire and CXF developer Dan Diephouse will explain how to use AtomPub to build services (“Building your next service with the Atom Publishing Protocol”)
• Finally, Jim Webber will elaborate on his approach to Web services, which according to him is remarkably similar to REST done right (“A couple of ways to skin an Internet-scale cat”). I can also heartily recommend his Guerilla SOA talk — the version of it he gave at QCon London is among my all-time favorite presentations. Jim has got a blog entry about QCon, too.

As you will probably notice if you’re a regular visitor here, I’ve somehow managed to assemble my personal speaker “dream team” :-)

Check out the complete schedule — there are lots of other impressive tracks and speakers, too.

I hear that registration is still possible …

In a new InfoQ interview, recorded at QCon London, Steve Jones head of SOA for Global Outsourcing at Cap Gemini, explains the ideas behind his concept of a "business service architecture", first outlined in his book  "Enterprise SOA Adoption Strategies".

Steve’s perspective is interesting because he sees SOA as a concept that is mostly a change of mind, a different view of IT and its organization, rather than a technology issue. His views, while often somewhat provocative, clearly stem from a lot of experience gained in customer projects.

Some choice quotes:

Historically IT has been more not as much driving the business but leading it into a pit of despair.

On IT as an architectural profession:

IT really is a paleontology profession, rather than an architectural profession. When we are in support, which is what we do a lot in outsourcing, you can see what the company was doing in 1985, you can see what it was doing in 1990, you can see what is was doing in 1995, and it’s just layer upon layer upon layer of systems on top of them.

On "shadow IT":

I think a big change is the rise of situation applications, participation applications, the web 2.0 pieces. The fact that the business is more and more taking these previous Excel generation of applications and wanting to run them on the existing IT estate, this currently called "shadow IT" which is a significant proportion of IT, is business aligned; it’s based clearly on the business objectives, it’s done by the business themselves or by surrogate IT inside the business. […]Traditional IT has two choices: it can either move purely into a support role, and a commodity development role, or it can recognize the challenge and really start to move into what is now shadow IT.

Other topics covered include how to apply SOA to existing systems, the problems one runs into when SOA is driven by technology, the structural and organizational impact of business-driven SOA, and motivating both providing and consuming services. Steve also makes the case for adopting the OASIS SOA Reference Model, which he help standardizing.

Watch the interview (18 minutes).

This is the next one in the series of interviews I did at QCon (after Anne Thomas Manes and Jim Webber). I often disagree with Steve, especially regarding his views on REST, but I have lots of respect for his high-level SOA point of view.

I’ve been involved with InfoQ for a year now, too — what do you think? Has it been worth it? I’d be very interested in your comments and suggestions, either here or over there. BTW: If you feel there’s something missing in terms of SOA-related content, we’re always looking for article suggestions …

I did another interview for InfoQ, this time with WSO2’s Sanjiva Weerawarana, who did his best to defend the WS-* vision. Make up your own mind whether he succeeded. I can honestly say I had to seriously restrain myself to not lose my “neutrality” completely :-)

Three excellent items at InfoQ worth pointing at:

• Obie’s post about Ruby fragmentation is a great write-up; just the right dose of reporting that you can only do if you’re not a journalist

• I’m not a fan of the ESB concept at all, but Mark Richards’s NFJS presentation (and the fact that it’s available in this form) is just great

• I was actually present when Floyd recorded this interview with Ivar Jacobson; I find a lot of things Ivar said very questionable, but it was absolutely cool to meet him.

InfoQ rocks.

In a recent blog post, IONA CTO Eric Newcomer wrote about the OASIS Transaction TC’s progress in standardizing the Web services WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity specifications. InfoQ editor Stefan Tilkov talked to Eric about this particular set of specifications, as well as the standardization process and the role of the big players in general.

More at InfoQ.

InfoQ now (finally) features videos — while still beta, clearly the coolest video playing feature I’ve seen, with simultaneous views of the presenter and the slides in this talk about JRuby.

Frank Leymann is a full professor at the University of Stuttgart and co-author of many Web Service specifications, including WSFL, WS-Addressing, WS-Metadata Exchange, WS-Business Agreement, and the WS-Resource Framework set of specifications. He was one of the driving forces behind BPEL4WS. Together with other researchers, he has published a paper proposing a research roadmap for service-oriented computing. InfoQ’s Stefan Tilkov recently had the chance to talk to Frank about the roadmap, REST, WS-* standards, and SOA in general. [Full story at InfoQ]

I don’t have much experience in interviewing people, but this was definitely fun.

InfoQ, the multi-community “unlaunched” a little more than a week ago, is working out very nicely and getting a lot of attention.

Please feel free to throw anything SOA-related you believe worth of a mention there at me via mail or post them to del.icio.us with a for:stilkov tag.

I’m pretty excited to be part of an initiative by Floyd Marinescu of TheServerSide.com fame, a new community site called InfoQ. Taken from the About page:

InfoQ.com (Information Queue) is an independent online community focused on change and innovation in enterprise software development, targeted primarily at the technical architect, technical team lead (senior developer), and project manager. InfoQ serves the Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, and Agile communities with daily news written by domain experts, articles, video interviews, video conference presentations, and mini-books. InfoQ primary mission is to contribute to the evolution of the communities we serve.

Together with Miko Matsumura, I will be responsible for the SOA community — which essentially means that I will post news about SOA-related stuff I consider to be relevant there, reserving this blog for my personal opinions. Contributors for other communities include Scott Ambler, Obie Fernandez, Deborah Hartmann, and David Totzke.

InfoQ (hm, I like that name … I wonder why?) has many cool features that make it pretty unique — apart from localization and much fancy Ajax UI sugar, the nicest one is personalization, which enables you to tailor it to your personal needs. This includes a personalized news feed that (hopefully) will contain only what you’re interested in.

You can find out more about the “unlaunch” (we just simply had to avoid the “beta” label) in Floyd’s introductory post. Remember that it’s still not fully ready — be kind with the development team (who did a great job), and let them know about any quirks at bugs@infoq.com.