WRAF 2004!

For Monday and Tuesday of this week I am at the WRAF (West Region Architect Forum) at Squaw Valley in Lake Tahoe. Although it was an excellent day of skiing on Saturday, I'm really here to run a series of breakout sessions on 'enterprise interoperability and integration'. This is a fairly open topic I admit, and one that covers interoperability with J2EE, mainframe integration, message queue integration etc.

The discussions in the breakouts have been really interesting. Looking at the feedback, interoperability with J2EE is still a mainstream topic of interest with many of the attendees wishing to discuss best practices and technology options for bridging the two. (As a takeway, I had copies of my book handy for those areas). Interoperability with mainframes / host systems was also high on the agenda for many of the attendees - with many wishing to know the relationship between HIS and third party products to take production applications on the mainframe and expose them to new applications and services in .NET.

Overall, this has been an excellent day - and has me thinking more about how we start to create true services from these numerous 'interoperability touch points'. Sure, exposing data from a mainframe/EJB/message bus as a Web service is great - and I hate to come up with yet a new term, but what more do we need to do to create true 'Service Oriented Interoperability'?