BEA, Cape Clear support SOAs

BEA Systems and Cape Clear Software are boosting SOAs (service-oriented architectures), hoping to ease the creation of enterprise application services.

With its Project Sierra strategy, BEA mapped out plans to increase support of SOAs. “It’s our long-term, three- to five-year technical vision for our product line and how customers can leverage that product line to build what we think of as the service-driven enterprise,” said Cornelius Willis, BEA vice president of developer marketing. The company is considering an ESB (enterprise service bus) to funnel services to different systems. A business design element in BEA’s plan will enable customers to restructure organizations to be as responsive as their IT infrastructure. Project Sierra would make BEA’s tools more accessible to business analysts. An SOA reference implementation also is planned.

Cape Clear Software has unwrapped SOA Editor, intended to ease development of  Web services. The product features tools for building a variety of services, including automated wizards for routine development tasks and tools for testing code and supporting XML-based schemas.

Cape Clear officials said they view SOAs as providing a standardized way of building software services that can be accessed, shared, and reused across the breadth of a network. An important feature of the SOA Editor is its capacity to simplify the creation and editing of WSDL, they said.

The development tool is integrated with the company’s existing commercial Business Integration Suite, sometimes referred to by company officials as an ESB.

“BEA and Cape Clear … hope to reduce the cost and complexity of moving to SOAs,” said Jason Bloomberg, analyst at ZapThink. “However, these tools won’t eliminate the complexity entirely, but rather provide some guidance as companies adopt SOAs.”