Dog food tastes good!

We've got quite a few success stories referenced on the SOA Resource Center. There are more in the works, but if you've ever worked on success stories before you'll know that writing them up is often difficult for a number of reasons, e.g., they can't be too technical and companies are often concerned about divulging internal secrets.

Anyway that's not the point of this posting: we're working on a couple of success stories that are based on our own internal use of the SOA Platform. Of course external readers will view these as slightly less important than "real" customers, but to be honest I think that's a bad thing. If anything they show our commitment to 'put our money where our mouth is'. In each case we've taken critical systems that have been running continuously for years based on competitor technologies and replaced them with our own products. It may seem like an obvious thing to do, but you'd be surprised how many companies don't do that. The feedback we've had from those development teams has been extremely positive and hopefully I'll be able to point at the relevant success story soon. Congratulations to everyone involved!

SOA Design Patterns

I've been writing a book on SOA and ESB for a while with a couple of friends. It's due to be part of Thomas Erl's SOA series later this year. While writing it Thomas asked us to produce some patterns for his book on SOA. Well the finished book, SOA Design Patterns, is now out and it's well worth a read. A number of people throughout the industry have helped to contribute some of the patterns within it so this is definitely a cross-industry collaborative effort. Thomas also wants it to be a live-work in as much as new patterns can be contributed by anyone. So take a look at the book and if you see something missing consider contributing it. Many of the patterns are influenced by our work with the JBoss SOA Platform.