This month, Gartner released the 2009 "hype cycle" curve, showing SOA has finally emerged from the "trough of dissillusionment".  As Gartner tells us, SOA is no different than other technologies, moving from initial inception, to extreme vendor hype, to dissilusionment as users feel swindled when reality falls far short of expectations.  See Joe McKendrick's article here , showing the hype cycle graph.  SOA is now marching forward on the "slope of enlightenment".  At this stage in its lifecycle, the over-hype of past years has been resoundly squelched, and the fundamental benefits of SOA, without the vendor exagerations we've come to expect, have become apparent to the masses of IT groups across many industries.  These IT groups are now "rolling up their sleeves", in Joe's terms, implementing projects using service oriented principles, and actually getting real value from those efforts.  SOA is not saving the world in and of itself, but rather has become an essential tool for those companies seeking greater productivity.  SOA makes IT more efficient, and helps focus energy on the essential purpose of IT: making the business run better, both now and in the future when inevitable business changes demand rapid change from software and systems.

Our data services project at XAware continues to gain strength.  As companies build business applications using service-oriented principles, accessing data in a service-oriented manner becomes critical.  Software from the XAware project addresses this need elegantly, especially when a company has complex data structures and varied formats spread across different systems.  XAware is open source, and can be found at www.xaware.org .