Open sourcing SOA

ZDNet's David Berlind points to the competitive threat open-source software poses to leading commercial suppliers, namely Microsoft. We're increasingly seeing adoption of open-source software in the Web services/SOA space as well. 

Open-source software from the LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python) and LAMJ (Linux-Apache-MySQL-J2EE) stacks are the choice of a  significant segment of Web services developers.

The Web services/SOA survey released earlier this week by Evans Data reveals that at about a third of Web services developers now embrace open-source application servers. A total of 33% use, as their first choice of platform, Apache/Tomcat, the open-source J2EE/Java application server. Apache has just about caught up with Microsoft’s .NET-based application server platform (includes IIS), which still leads with 37%.

Microsoft continues to dominate many phases of the process. Three out of four Web services developers build their applications on Windows workstations, and deploy at least some of them within a .NET Framework.