2 >>DataServices World in Silicon Valley Explores SOA and Cloud Computing
Conference Presentations and Workshop Puts Focus on the Future of Enterprise, Web and Cloud Data
The DataServices World Fall 2008 conference in San Jose was co-located with SOAWorld, Virtualization Conference and Cloud Computing Conference and Expo. Because cloud computing is "The Next Big Thing", registration for the co-located events approached 1200 on opening day. Likewise there were more than 40 exhibitors and boots sprawled over the ballroom level of the Fairmont Hotel.
The speaker lineup included an ACM Fellow, researchers from IBM and Adobe Systems, and executives and architects from m2mi Corporation, Netrics, Data Direct Technologies and Thomson Reuters. The conference program included presentations about service modeling, data services and tools for their creation. There were also presentations about scalable architectures, data processing in the cloud and a review of information retrieval, databases and cheap computing. The program also included a workshop with instruction on data matching, tagging to impart semantics and integrating data from disparate sources.
My entree to the co-located conferences was the opening keynote, "SOA by the Numbers", by David Linthicum. Unfortunately the session started 45 minutes late and David had to accelerate his presentation. Nonetheless he managed to cover key topics and impart several pearls of wisdom
- Differences in micro and macro domain SOA
- The ongoing shortage of SOA architects
- SOA is journey, not a project
- The importance of proof of concept SOA implementations.
DataServices World in San Jose, like its predecessor in New York City, was an event that provided insights into frameworks for creating data services. The New York event included Mike Pizzo's presentation about ADO.NET Data Services. The San Jose conference included Susan Malaika's presentation about Universal Services from IBM and Jeff Vroom's presentation about Adobe LiveCycle Data Services.
Universal Services, Service Modeling
Susan Malaika, Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM Santa Teresa Lab, presented “Universal Services for SOA, WOA, Cloud Computing and XML Applications". Susan demonstrated software from IBM, including an XForms generator, that works with a industry-specific application vocabularies, such as FpML, XBRL and ACORD. The software and application-specific schemas are available at IBM alphaworks.
Dr. Michael Carey, Bren Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of California, Irvine, presented "Data Services Modeling", a session about the role modeling can play in the development of data services for a service-oriented architecture (SOA). He discussed creating Entity and Utility services, with support for Create Replace Update and Delete (CRUD) operations.
Grid and Cloud Computing
Parand "Tony" Darugar, Director of Software Architecture at Yahoo, delivered "Data Processing in the Cloud". Parand explained the power of Hadoop for distributed processing applications. Hadoop is an open source Java environment. He explained how Map/Reduce can be used for large jobs, such as indexing the web for Yahoo Search.
In his keynote address, Rob Steward, Vice President of Research and Development at DataDirect Technologies, discussed data services in SOA, WOA and Cloud Computing environments. Joining Rob on stage, Eric Samson explained Service Data Objects (SDO)and SDO Data Access Services (DAS).
Scalable Architecture
Geoff Brown, CEO of m2mi Corporation, presented "Modeling and Machine Intelligence", a session about service modeling and a scalable architecture for data services. He discussed techniques such as dynamic network (router) reconfiguration and applying semantics technology (RDF). He also demoed the m2mi modeling tool.
