Grid is 'the new ESB,' and a warning about Web 2.0 interfaces

David Chappell (the SOA Oracle of Oracle) issued his predictions for the market over the coming year, and says that grid computing will be hot, hot hot. But, he cautions, "the definition of grid will be as fuzzy as ESB [Enterprise Service Bus], " given "the various concepts of hardware grids, compute grids, and data grids, and different approaches taken by vendors."

To each vendor its own ESB and grid

David has also been keen on the concept of SOA-grid convergence. He feels they are a good match for the requirements of enterprise-scale SOA. At November's InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum, I saw him deliver a great presentation on how SOA requires a robust underlying infrastructure to effectively scale as service traffic spikes. Both stateful and stateless services need the ability to scale across multiple nodes as demand requires.

He notes that the financial sector may lead the way here, with something called "eXtreme Transaction Processing" (XTP) running on top of a grid architecture.

David sees more Web 2.0 methodologies coming into the enterprise as a means of accessing and mashing up applications and data. He issues a warning, however, regarding the growing adoption of Web 2.0 interfaces in conjunction with back-end SOA:

"Some of those Web 2.0 applications will fail, with an important piece of the user interface just not showing up one day because one of the supporting feeds just isn’t there any more. The guy who mashed it up in the first place doesn’t work there anymore, and many will be scrambling to figure out who is supposed to fix it, and who to point the finger at."

That's why governance is becoming such an urgent requirement, he adds.

David also sees growth for Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), as well as increasing support for Service Component Architecture (SCA).