While reading my SOA magazine tonight I learned about even more technologies out there that seem interesting. I'm used to developing everything from scratch and thinking that way. I'm trying to break from my mindset and be open to what's out there. What I'm seeing is that there are tons and tons of technologies based on standards that work together to make systems more sophisticated than you could imagine, quicker and easier than if you were to try and do everything the way I'm used to doing it. The trick is to know about the technologies and standards in the first place, and to learn how to use them. There are a lot out there.

Tonight I was reading about BAM, web service orchestration using BPEL, and PEP (policy enforcement points). PEP interested me the most because as a developer you don't have to worry about the security of services you expose. You might have 30 services on 8 servers. Using special software (or even hardware) you can control security policies for all of your services. Consumers access the service through the PEP proxy which adds authentication, encryption, and other security features. The PEP might authenticate against an LDAP server. Really cool stuff.

I went on google looking for commercial software starting with Sun. The article was about Oracle's suite but I've become a Nebeans 5.5 fan and am interested in Sun at the moment. I was looking for comercial software because I've noticed a difference between the open source systems and comercial ones. I've seen both Websphere application server and Sun application server (briefly) and compared them to open source JBoss. In the comercial software there is a nice web based GUI to configure everything from datasources to message queues, etc... With JBoss, once you realize you need to do something you go to google, search for it, read forums and find out which XML files you need to edit or create. I can't complain too much because JBoss is free. Well, I couldn't complain until now.

Tonight I found out that Sun has made their entire suite of enterprise server software and developer tools open source, along with their now open source Solaris UNIX operating system! Their application server, portal server, identity server, web service management, etc etc.. everything is now free. If you want support you can pay $50-$140/year per developer for support. I am extremely excited about this!! No more fudding around with JBoss and Eclipse. I think I'm going to become a Sun.. what's a good word? Sun whore. I'll use their IDE, their servers and middleware, their programming language, JVM, and heck.. I'll even get Sun certified. There are may levels of ceritifcation that cover many areas of programming. The highest being Enterprise Architech. Over the next 2 years I want to work on becoming a Sun certified Enterprise Architecht.

Imagine developing software on Sun server hardware, using the Sun Solaris operating system, developing using Sun's NetBeans and Sun's enterprise server software. (drule)