The swordfish (xiphias gladius) uses its sharp elongated bill to slash through its prey making sushi of smaller fish. Likewise, the advocates of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform codenamed Swordfish, which is now making its way through the Eclipse incubator process, argue it will slash through obstacles to SOA development.

Packt is pleased to announce a new book “SOA Approach to Integration” which shows how to define SOA integration architecture, what technologies to use, and how to best integrate existing applications with modern e-business solutions.

DataDirect Technologies Extends its Lead in Mainframe SOA with New Standards-Based Web Services Orchestration Capabilities

DataDirect® Shadow® Version 7 will Include Native BPEL 2.0 Runtime and Eclipse-Based Studio with BPEL Developer; Exploitation of zIIP/ zAAP Specialty Engines Dramatically Lowers Costs and Improves Performance

In the early days of BPM (four or five years ago) everyone thought BPEL was the BPM standard, at least for runtime execution. Not long after, the importance of business-friendly process modeling came to the fore, and BPMN emerged as the standard for that. The mismatch between graph-oriented BPMN models, where you can route the flow just about anywhere, and block-oriented BPEL, where you can't, didn't seem to worry BPM vendors. After all, a model was just a model, a business requirements document in diagrammatic form.

Iona Technologies is updating its Artix and Fuse SOA product lines, which feature the Artix closed source enterprise service bus and the Fuse open source technologies.

Iona offers a distributed approach to SOA that supports combinations of open source and closed source software. "We could call that the hybrid approach," said Eric Newcomer, Iona CTO.