European coders are moving to SOA in a big way, according to BEA -- ADTmag

European coders are moving to SOA in a big way, according to BEA

By ADT Staff
January 26, 2005

BEA recently released a survey it conducted with 1,000 developers in Europe, with 75 percent indicating they "are either developing, or expect to be developing, service-oriented architectures this year." However, results varied by country. Surveys of developers in London and Madrid found 30 percent and nearly 25 percent, respectively, were already doing SOA development. But Parisian coders are not so enthusiastic, with only 10 percent responding that they are doing SOA development.

While it may not be a Paris fashion, BEA predicts this is the year of the SOA applications.

"We believe that 2005 can be the year of the business project, not the IT project," said Jim Rivera, director of technology, BEA Systems, in a comment released with the survey. "We see a shift to SOA as being driven by the demand for IT to better align with the business and facilitate changing business processes." Asked what they liked about SOA, 28 percent cited the ability to incorporate Web services into applications.

Next came service orchestration for business processes using standards such as BPEL and BPELJ, which was noted by 18 percent. An equal percentage cited the Apache Beehive framework, technology BEA donated to Apache this past year. At the time, BEA told ADT it expects the open-source framework to become an easy-to-use, open-source foundation for building enterprise Java and SOA applications.

Beehive is based on a variety of BEA’s WebLogic features, including Java annotations, Java Controls, Java Web services and Java Page Flows. In addition, open-source developers are expected to build on BEA's Web services programming capabilities that are said to allow for easier consumption and management of services and page flows, which can help developers to define and view page transitions between applications