Ronan Bradley's FinanceTech Directions

As the title of this blog is "Roads to SOA" (for the moment at least), I though it was worth noting two anniversaries which relate to two of the most significant factors in the implementation of SOA: The Open Source movement and XML.

Over the last 3-4 years in particular, Open Source has been one of the major feature of SOA technology landscape and looks like only becoming stronger as OSS projects mature and IT budgets get squeezed in the economic downturn. Denis Byron also celebrates the anniversary and provides some excellent counterpoints to the more outlandish OSS claims in general. To quote Dennis: " I can't quickly think of any (never mind "many") "business computing category" in which open source software is a leader". In the context of SOA, OSS is a major feature - although it is not a leader as yet.

XML is also 10 years old - I almost felt like writing 'only' as XML is so much part of the fabric these days it is hard to imagine a time before it existed. Over the 10 years, XML turned out to be a giant leap forward by allowing data formats to be defined independently of technology in a way not attempted before and launched countless bodies to define XML standards for industries from telecoms to financial services to travel.

In 'celebration', Tim Bray published a long piece on the people and early history which Tim Anderson both summarises and criticises for Tim Bray's hostility towards Microsoft (a common feature of the OSS community as well of course). Criticism is hardly surprising when Tim Bray makes the delightful remark that "Mick [Microsoft in his semi-allegorical history] is a domineering, ruthless, greedy, egotistical, self-centered, paranoid bastard.".

Tim's views on Mircosoft's attitude to standards are clearly heart felt. However, having been involved with standards processes over the years - I am not sure Microsoft is necessarily that much more 'evil' than other companies which attempt to manouver the standards process to aid their commercial goals. Also having lived through the CORBA/DCOM wars in the 1990s when Microsoft was not part of the process, it seems clear to me that XML benefitted more from Microsoft's involvement more than it would have benefited from being pure and free from Microsoft which no doubt would have followed a different track and created a competing standard.

Ronan