[alf-dev] ALF in perspective

[Suzanne Yoakum-Stover <systover@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fellows,

I first learned about ALF from a great talk given by Brian Carroll and Kevin 
Parker of Serena (www.serena.com) at Eclipse World in August 
(http://www.eclipseworld.net/).   I immediately became interested because my 
work is  turning toward the integration of disparate, often stove-piped 
systems in order to support better information propagation and sharing as 
well as to leverage those systems to build new processes and capabilities.   

Looking through the information on the ALF project page 
(http://www.eclipse.org/alf/), I was caught by the statement that "ALF is SOA 
for developers," and began to wonder whether I got the wrong impression.  

Perhaps someone on this list can set me straight.  

What I'm looking for is some perspective on where ALF fits in to the variety 
of existing and emerging integration technologies.  In particular, I'd like 
to better understand the domain and range, if you will, of J2EE, web 
services, semantic web technologies, SOA, and of course, ALF.  

My current understanding is that J2EE is an integration technology for legacy 
systems and especially DBs, any of which may be remote.  J2EE provides the 
plumbing for hooking up those systems and encapsulates the business process 
management in some sort of java class or perhaps using a BPEL engine.  

As I understand it, web services simply expose application services on the web 
in an implementation independent way.   These services could well include 
ones provided by J2EE systems.  

SOA adds mechanisms for automatic service discovery and negotiation.  For this 
to really be mechanized (i.e. without requiring a human to interpret the 
metadata), we need machine processable vocabularies (say RDF), ontologies (in 
say OWL), and ideally, the rest of the semantic web technology stack (logic, 
proof, trust).   

In contrast to J2EE which is server-centric and server-bound, SOA is  
process-centric and hardware-unbound.  

Today, I see a lot of effort going in to building J2EE systems for integrating 
DBs, and an almost blind rush to turn everything into web services.   What I 
have not seen much about is the process management piece that would enable 
everything in a work flow.  I thought ALF might be such a thing, but the 
emphasis in ALF seems to be on the development rather than the business 
lifecycle.  

I apologize for the long email and look forward to your comments,

Suzi



-- 
Suzanne Yoakum-Stover, Ph.D.
Sr. Computational Scientist
SAIC
6359 Walker Lane
Alexandria, VA 22310
(703) 253-1208