It’s All the Buzz

At a recent Gartner Group Web Services conference in Los Angeles, a swarm of new buzzwords and acronyms filled the air.  You may want to print and clip this list for future reference.

Leave-and-layer - Wrap new interfaces around old functionality

Rip-and-replace - Rewrite old code to adapt it to a new set of requirements

Hype-Curve - The adoption curve for the introduction of a new technology.

WS - Web Services (sometimes called application services)
These usually include some combination of programming and data that are made available from a business' web servers for users or other Web-connected programs

SOBA - Service-Oriented Business Applications
These applications integrate several back-end, service-based modules into a seamless business-oriented software solution

SODA - Service-Oriented Development of Applications      

SOA - Service-Oriented Architecture
This is an architecture type for developing reusable services.

BPEL - Business Process Execution Language
This is an XML-based language designed to enable task-sharing using Web services.  Using BPEL, a programmer formally describes a business process that will take place across the Web in such a way that any cooperating entity can perform one or more steps in the process the same way. In a supply chain process, for example, a BPEL program might describe a business protocol that formalizes what pieces of information a product order consists of, and what exceptions may have to be handled. The BPEL program would not, however, specify how a given web service should process a given order internally

ESB - Enterprise Service Bus
This product category describes a set of modules that simplify integration and broadly implement SOA.  ESB is a new kind of middleware that combines features from several previous types of middleware into one package.  ESBs support web services and other communication styles that involve guaranteed delivery and publish-and-subscribe. All ESBs provide some value-added services beyond those found in basic communication middleware, such as message validation, transformation, content-based routing, security, service discovery for a service-oriented architecture (SOA), load balancing, failover and logging.

APS - Application Platform Suites 
This is a category of applications introduced by Gartner to designate those integrated packages containing an Enterprise Application Server, Integration Broker and Portal Server that shares a single middleware infrastructure, single systems management, single set of development tools, a single web services framework and a shared metadata repository. 

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