Todd Biske: Outside the Box

I was reading the October 2 edition of eWeek, and on page 16 there is article by Darryl K. Taft titled, “AJAX, SOA to Merge.” The rate of acronym mergers and acquisitions is beginning to rival the rate of SOA company mergers and acquisitions. The bulk of the article is devoted to a discussion of some announcements from JackBe and TIBCO. The one that set me off was on JackBe’s Presto platform which now includes an “ASB (AJAX Service Bus).” So now I need a specific service bus to each technology I use to expose services? I thought that technology mediation was a key feature of an ESB? Of course that’s not entirely true since I seem to be hearing more and more about ESB federation. That seems like an oxymoron to me. We need to forget about all of the marketing buzzwords and focus on the capabilities (not acronyms) that are needed by the enterprise like mediation, transformation, security, etc.