I am glad to introduce you to a new set of resources to help surface scalability and performance issues in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA.) The SOA Knowledge and Performance Kit is a free open-source resource to show you what it really takes to build services using today's leading SOA development platforms. The Kit delivers an SOA use case design, source code to the implementations of the use case on Oracle, IBM, BEA, and TIBCO platforms, developer journals describing our experiences step-by-step, a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator, and performance and scalability tests that leverage the PushToTest test automation platform.

Sun is offering ten grants of US $11,500 - equivalent to several months of pay for developers in some countries - for the best NetBeans projects submitted by open source developers. Conceived as a means of increasing general awareness around the NetBeans project as well as rewarding good work done by the NetBeans Community, the 'Dreams of Reality' contest is described in detail by worldwide NetBeans Community Manager Bruno Souza, the charismatic Brazilian developer, in a special audio webcast currently playing on SYS-CON.TV.

Many articles have already been written about service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Service Component Architecture (SCA), for example, see references [1] and [2]. In this article we'll focus on a freely available, open source implementation of the Service Component Architecture that provides a simple way to implement SOA solutions. This SCA implementation is being developed in the Apache Tuscany Incubator project. The project started in 2006 and is being used by many who are looking for a simple SOA infrastructure. The recent Tuscany SCA version 1.0, which was released in September 2007, supports the Service Component Architecture specifications 1.0.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) stands on the twin pillars of reusability and interoperability. Any business function that can be reused is an ideal candidate to be exposed as a service. A reusable service, until and unless implemented in an interoperable manner, isn't much use. Web Services standards provide standards-based interfaces for service description, discovery, and message definitions to invoke such services.

The term Web Services refers to loosely coupled, executable application components linked dynamically over the network with open standards. Typically, they are software components that employ one or a combination of the following XML standards: SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. Ruby on Rails is an open source Web application framework written in Ruby that closely follows the Model View Controller (MVC) architecture. It strives for simplicity, allowing real-world applications to be developed in less code than other frameworks and with a minimum of configuration. To define Rails - the Web Services or a Web Framework - we have to say that Rails is a full-stack, open source Web development framework that requires comparatively less time and effort to code XML interfaces than most other frameworks.

Over the past year, Web services have been positioned as a key enabler to application e-business integration. Many companies and vendors have made large investments in supporting the Web services development process.

I believe that Web services may make the long-standing battle of open source software (OSS) versus closed source software (CSS) almost irrelevant. What!, you cry in incredulity. He can't mean that! How can he discount the efforts and thinking of some of the world's most brilliant programmers? However, before you blast out a scathing e-mail flaming me to a crisp, listen to my reasons, then decide if you don't agree with me.