I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

Many articles have already been written about service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Service Component Architecture (SCA), for example, see references [1] and [2]. In this article we'll focus on a freely available, open source implementation of the Service Component Architecture that provides a simple way to implement SOA solutions. This SCA implementation is being developed in the Apache Tuscany Incubator project. The project started in 2006 and is being used by many who are looking for a simple SOA infrastructure. The recent Tuscany SCA version 1.0, which was released in September 2007, supports the Service Component Architecture specifications 1.0.

Service oriented architecture (SOA) could revolutionize the way we think about IT. Why is that possible? Because SOA finally has the potential to make the concept of reuse real. Companies have been talking about reuse for years, but have never been able to transform that talk into full-scale reality. Now, you might be asking, 'How can SOA succeed where previous approaches have failed?' Because the standards, best practices and governance models have finally matured to the point where reuse can actually work.

In each column, The EJB Advocate presents the gist of a typical back-and-forth dialogue exchange with actual customers and developers in the course of recommending a solution to an interesting design issue. Any identifying details have been obscured, and no 'innovative' or proprietary architectures are presented. For more information, see Introducing the EJB Advocate at the IBM developerWorks website.

Securing access to information is basic to any application. Security becomes even more critical for implementations structured according to SOA principles due to their loose coupling of services and applications and their operation across organizational boundaries. Such an environment often exposes the delicacy or limitations of existing security implementations.

This article will introduce you to Workplace Designer 2.5. We begin with a brief overview of Workplace Designer and how you can use it to create Workplace applications. We then take a closer look at some of the many features included in Workplace Designer. We assume that you have experience with Web application development. Some familiarity with IBM Workplace products (such as IBM Workplace Collaboration Services 2.5 and IBM Workplace Services Express 2.5) would also be helpful.

Interoperability is the key to using Web services architecture since many applications can collaborate to maximize business functions. With the capability of creating an application on a different architecture, including the application architecture, hardware infrastructure, and even the operating system, Web service architecture is the bridge to optimizing the IT Department.

As many people correctly predicted, Web services and their corresponding service-oriented architecture (SOA) have proven their promise. Companies and businesses are starting to not only integrate new components and technologies, but are also opening up back-end systems and legacy processes.

Portlets constitute interactive Web application components whose presentation markup is aggregated and displayed by a portal server like WebSphere Portal. In a previous WebSphere Journal article, we introduced you to the Java Specification Request for the portlet specification (JSR 168), which lays out the plans for a standard for portlets that will enable them to be deployed to any JSR 168 compliant portal.

Mercosul (or Mercosur) is a trading zone among Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay founded in 1991. Its purpose is to promote free trade and the movement of goods and people, and skills and money between these countries. The four member countries combined represent the fourth largest economy in the world.

The successful development of scalable Web services on WebSphere (or any other application server) requires thorough performance testing. Applying a well-designed, consistent performance testing methodology throughout the development life-cycle is key in satisfying a Web services application's performance requirements.

UDDI allows providers to publish information about their services in a common registry. A key part of this process is to describe services in an accurate and consistent way so potential users can easily find them using UDDI inquiry functions. Classifying services with user-defined taxonomies is an effective way to improve search results.

The technology world is abuzz with talk of Web services. Code warriors and suits alike are touting it as the next big thing. The incorruptible Apache Software Foundation has spawned a whole top-level project dedicated to it.

Web services performance comes of age in WebSphere Application Server (WAS) version 5.0.2, but just as with more traditional J2EE applications, the performance of Web services applications is largely determined by the design of the application and the database.

The Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) is an architecture and programming model that - unlike today's most popular Web services APIs, JAX-RPC and JAXM - supports RPC and messaging invocation of Web services in a single programming model.

Today's most popular Web services APIs - JAX-RPC and JAXM - support two very different programming models for invocation of Web services, one synchronous, one asynchronous. If users need both models in a single application, they are forced to use two sets of very different APIs. This article, the first of a two-part series, describes an architecture and programming model - the Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) - that provides a single set of APIs that supports both models.

Web services are no longer a new concept. They are rapidly gaining acceptance and use in the development of e-business applications. By now, the benefits of using Web services are clear: they provide a modular, self-describing, and self-contained mechanism to share business logic over the Internet using standardized messaging protocols. Business logic is separated from the client code and the database and can be made available to numerous applications.

If you follow the latest trends in the software industry, you will have noticed that Web services technology is getting a lot of attention. While it is not a completely new thing anymore, more companies are getting serious about Web services today and putting solutions into production that provide and/or consume Web services interfaces. One crucial aspect of this is standardization. The promise of Web services technology is to allow you to connect applications that were developed on different platforms and in different programming languages.

WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) version 5.0 is the latest version of IBM's J2EE e-business application development tool. WSAD supports all phases of Web service development: the initial development of components such as JavaBeans or Enterprise JavaBeans, the transformation of those components into Web services, the testing of the Web services, and the publication of the Web services in a UDDI-compliant registry. The focus of this article is Web services development and testing.

As we strive to add more value to the business as computing professionals, the marriage of business processes and Web services provides opportunities to get closer to our business colleagues. The business process scripting languages, Web Services Flow Language (WSFL) and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), provide a mechanism for integrating Web services to form cohesive business processes.

Web services initiatives are expected to change the very nature of computing and of application development. While Web services projects may not be fully realized today, many organizations are beginning to build the infrastructure to support this important development venture. According to analysts, WebSphere Studio will be one of the primary tools used to develop Web services.

The explosion of Web services has spawned significant new challenges for IT operations and the technologies they use. As the infrastructure requirements for WebSphere applications continue to get more complex, the addition of Web services suddenly expands the management focus to systems and applications that may reside outside of IT's control.

Web services, designed primarily for companies to leverage their business services to a global market, also has value and benefits for companies at the enterprise level. Even if you choose to postpone your company's global Web services offerings, the integration and development benefits presented by Web services are worth investigating.

In my previous article (WSDJ, Vol. 1, issue 7), I gave you a glimpse of the Web Services Object Runtime Framework (WORF), a set of tools for implementing Web services with DB2 and WebSphere. WORF is deployed on WebSphere Application Server (WAS) and uses Apache SOAP 2.2.

Part 1 of this article (WSDJ, Vol.1, issue 7) showed how to create and use SOAP message-based Web services in WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD). The standard behavior of such services is synchronous. Despite the provision for asynchronous operation of the message-based Web service proxy in Part 1, the operation wasn't actually asynchronous. This article shows how to provide for truly asynchronous operation using threads.

I've been involved with Web services for more than a year now. After the initial fascination and learning curve that are part of any new technology comes the part where you roll up your sleeves and start applying it for the sake of solving real problems or making architectural improvements to an existing system - as opposed to applying the technology for the sake of applying the technology.

WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) includes support for developing SOAP-based Web services. For example, the WSAD Web Services wizard allows you to turn a JavaBean into a SOAP RPC-based Web service with almost no work. In addition, WSAD can create a proxy for the RPC-based Web service, greatly simplifying its use.

In my last article (WSDJ, Vol. 1, issue 4) I showed you how to use WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) to develop and publish a Web service. You saw how to use the Web services wizard to wrap an existing Java method as a Web service and expose the metadata required for invoking the service. You also saw how the UDDI Explorer is used to publish your service on a public registry so others can find and use it.

Portals provide personalized access to information, applications, processes, and people. Typically, portals get information from local or remote data sources such as databases, transaction systems, syndicated content providers, and remote Web sites.

IBM's WebSphere Portal currently supports mobile devices by generating portal pages in three markup languages: HTML for desktop computers and some PDAs, WML for WAP devices, and cHTML for devices in the NTT DoCoMo i-mode network. This article focuses on portlet development for WAP devices, including a brief introduction to WAP and WML, and discusses various WAP emulators for portlet testing. The article's source code is not necessarily driven by best practices or performance considerations.

So you've heard all about how great Web services are and how they are revolutionizing the way distributed systems are being developed. You've read all about how this new set of standards is changing the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) space and how it's finally making interoperability possible.

Speech recognition is the process by which computer-based software converts audible voice into digital text. When you think of computer-based speech recognition, most people picture someone sitting at a desk, wearing a headset microphone, dictating large volumes of text into a desktop system. But speech-recognition technology, over the past decade, has moved from the desktop to the server, from use by an individual to use by the enterprise.

Welcome to the newest addition to WebSphere Developer's Journal. This column is devoted to the subject of Web services within the WebSphere family of products.