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BEA's Patrick discusses Project Free Flow

Chief architect talks about SOA, WS, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft

By Paul Krill, InfoWorld, 06/13/05

June 13, 2005—Paul Patrick is the chief architect for BEA Systems' Project Free Flow product release. Project Free Flow is intended to enable deployment of services infrastructure for SOA (service-oriented architecture), with an enterprise service bus serving as a key component. Previously, Patrick worked on CORBA technology at Digital Equipment. InfoWorld editor at large Paul Krill recently interviewed Patrick about SOA, Project Free Flow, and other topics, including the company's relationship with Java founder Sun Microsystems.

InfoWorld: Everyone is talking about SOA. How does BEA's approach to SOA differ from the approach of competitors such as IBM or Sun Microsystems?

Patrick: What's different is we're taking a broader view of the problem than just Web services. We believe it really needs an infrastructure approach. A bus will take you to a certain point, but you need richer security, richer routing, richer management, and it's typically found in most of the individual bus-type products. So we see it as bringing all of these pieces together and moving really up the curve, if you will, and focusing on the agility for IT to be able to react to changes in the business by making it easier to compose applications rather than code them.

InfoWorld: An enterprise service bus is featured in Free Flow. It's been called QuickSilver. What do you see as the criticality of the enterprise service bus? There's been debate in the industry about what exactly an enterprise service bus is and whether or not you need one.

Patrick: Well, an enterprise service bus filled some pretty significant voids. As enterprises start building services and the services begin to proliferate, one of the problems that can occur in a classic approach is a lot of point-to-point connections. And in making the point-to-point connections, applications are back down into riding very close to the plumbing level. A service bus can help address that point-to-point scenario, can help provide the abstraction so that an application developer can focus on the business logic itself, instead of on "How do I manipulate and deal with the plumbing that gets from point to point?" This allows for new versions of services and services that have lifecycle without having to perturb everybody in the communication path.

InfoWorld: I understand that Free Flow is intended to take BEA beyond Java. How is it going to do that and why do you see the need to do that?

Patrick: The reason Free Flow needs to go beyond Java is that the reality in most IT shops is that few, if any, are homogeneous. They're not all J2EE shops or all .Net shops. They tend to have a mix. And as a result we have to come up with a way [to] tie these together. So it's not about the best programming language or the best programming paradigm anymore. From a business standpoint, it's how can I quickly, easily, and [with the] least amount of cost, solve a business problem by utilizing different technologies that I may already have and exposing them as services? And the realization is, because of this heterogeneity, there are a number of shops that—even if [they] are a J2EE shop—have multiple vendors' [products]. The reality is we've got to make this all tie together, because this is really all about integration. Integration is not a homogeneous issue. It's a heterogeneous type of problem.

For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.