Stylus Studio announced the immediate availability of Stylus Studio 2006 Release 3 XML Enterprise Edition. The new release includes powerful new XML tools, enhancements to Stylus Studio XML Deployment Components, and support for many widely used data processing components for working with XQuery, XSL:FO, EDI and XSLT technologies.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) refers to an architectural solution that creates an environment in which services, service consumers, and service producers co-exist yet have no dependence on each other. SOA enables an enterprise to increase the loose coupling and the reuse of frequently used software assets. These software assets together with the functionality that they provide are called services in SOA terminology. By nature SOAs are typically applied to solutions with highly volatile requirements.

Extensible Markup Language, or XML, is more than a simple syntax for Internet transport. It entails a new way of thinking about information. Different communities embrace the language for different reasons. Its platform and vendor neutrality make it a natural format for Service Oriented Architectures and Web Services.

OSS Nokalva announced the availability of the OSS XML Schema (XSD) Tools for Java. The OSS XSD Tools are now available for C/C+, and Java. The OSS XSD Tools for Java bind XSD schema to Java representations.

MajescoMastek, a leading software solutions andintegration service provider, today introduced the first ente rpriseservice-oriented architecture (SOA) platform for life and annuitycompanies.

Fiorano Software, Inc., a leading provider ofbusiness integration and enterprise messaging solutions, announced todaythat its Fiorano SOA(TM) 2006 Platform has been selected by the UB Group,the world's second largest distilled spirits company, to integrate itsvarious applications including SAP.

SAP AG today announced that Coldwater Creek , a leading specialty women's apparel retailer in the U.S., will adopt the SAP NetWeaver(R) platform as the strategic foundation to drive immediate cost savings by simplifying integration efforts and align around an enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) to create agility and flexibility across the organization. In an increasingly competitive environment in which retailers are looking to reduce operational costs while increasing customer value and improving margins, Coldwater Creek has selected SAP NetWeaver to provide one common platform for composing new business processes, seamlessly integrating applications and supporting flexible business strategies. The announcement was made at Retail Systems 2006 Conference and Exposition, being held in Chicago, Illinois, May 21-24.

SYS-CON Events (www.event s.sys-con.com)announced today that Rogue Wave Software will be one of the platinumsponsors of the SOA Web Services Edge Conference to take place June 5-6,2006, at the historical Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.

Cassatt(R) Corporation, an innovator in providing enterprise software and services to enable agile IT infrastructures, today announced general availability of the Cassatt Collage(TM) Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM). This product enables efficient and reliable server consolidation by providing unified, automated management for both physical and virtual machines (VMs). XVM helps customers rein in the growing problem of 'virtual machine sprawl,' using a vendor-neutral architecture to automate control across virtual servers from multiple sources, including VMware, Xen, and Microsoft.

ActiveCampaign, announced the immediate availability of SupportTrio Version 2.6. Starting with version 2.6 a number of AJAX enabled features are implemented into the integrated PHP help desk solution. The new version's extensive list of added features and improvements include: Spell check, Live viewing indicator, Live typing indicator.

So what's hot these days in the world of SOA? Governance, registries, orchestration...? Nope. As folks looking to implement SOA seek that first killer project the emphasis is on what to do, not what you use, and that's exactly the right way to think. As SOA becomes more of a reality among the Global 2000, the focus on discipline as a concept will be as important as solutions, perhaps more important than many expect. Let me explain.

This year's conference will feature a distinguished faculty, whose members are the world's top celebrity experts in their fields, presenting six simultaneous tracks and power panels in three distinct themes: SOA Web Services, Enterprise Open Source, and Real-World AJAX. http://www.soaeosco nference.sys-con.com.

ECMA International, the Swiss body standardizing Microsoft's Office Open XML document format, says that Gartner doesn't know what it's talking about and is naïve about the standards process when it claims that Microsoft has little prayer of ISO standardizing Redmond's Open Office XML.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. , the creator and leading advocate of Java(TM) technology, today furthered its support for the AJAX community by launching two new comprehensive online resources for AJAX application development as well as Project jMaki, an open source JavaScript Wrapper Framework for the Java Platform. As a proud sponsor of The AJAX Experience 2006, an international two-day conference exclusively for the AJAX community, taking place May 10-12 in San Francisco, Sun is reinforcing its commitment to AJAX and the next generation of Web application development on the Java Platform.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services (along with the underlying XML protocol) promise to greatly simplify the implementation of distributed computing applications, both within the enterprise and between enterprises. The widespread acceptance of Web Services across operating systems, middleware, and application vendors will lead to simplified interoperability, thus allowing for increased business agility and lower development costs.

SOA initiatives have gathered momentum in the past year with more enterprises either implementing SOA or considering implementing in the near future. The implementations we studied reveal that one of the critical challenges in SOA is designing an effective governance mechanism. A good understanding of governance concepts is essential to implementing and operating a successful SOA. Reliable governance for SOA leads to a manifold increase in an enterprise's ability to achieve the goal of business agility through SOA.

There is a lot of talk about how SOA will significantly lower the need for developers, thus the savings of SOA. This will be accomplished through the promise of reuse that's driving many toward the SOA light. However, I'm not sure we'll see a reduction in development with the advent of SOA, but perhaps rather a redistribution of talent in the longer term. At the end of the day, the reason for leveraging SOA is agility. Reuse and development savings are a secondary benefit, if they happen at all.

SYS-CON Events (www.event s.sys-con.com)announced today that the opening keynote of its 10th international SOA WebServices Conference will be delivered by Cassatt (www.cassatt.com) founderand CEO Bill Coleman (William T. Coleman) on Monday, June 5, 2006, at 8:00am. This year's conference will take place at the historical RooseveltHotel in New York City.

The hype around Web services outpaced that of just about every technology we covered this year. SOA, XML, AJAX and Web 2.0 have not only created new ways for businesses to work together, but also new avenues for intruders to gain access to your data and systems. Forum XWall is one of the few SOA security products that fights unnecessary complexity. It lets admins easily perform a high-level configuration to gain some basic protection.

Stylus Studio, the provider of XML tools and components for advanced data integration, announced the availability of a new XQuery tutorial entitled: Defining your own Functions in XQuery. This new tutorial provides numerous XQuery examples and valuable technical insight that is certainly worth book-marking! Learn how to leverage powerful XQuery functions in just minutes.

SYS-CON Events (www.event s.sys-con.com)announced today that Centric CRM will be one of the sponsors of the SOAEnterprise Open Source Conference to take place June 5-6, 2006, at thehistorical Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.

As XQuery applications became more complex, so does the need to document XQuery library modules and main modules. Furthermore, as the use of XQuery becomes increasingly popular, developers need example XQuery code and supporting documentation. The XQuery developer community can now use the world's best XQuery tools and xqDoc together, according to Stylus Studio.

With power comes responsibility. The promise of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers significant opportunity for service reuse and the realization of a fully integrated enterprise. But left unchecked, the flexibility enabled by an SOA will result in a Wild Wild West of enterprise IT. To properly harness the power of SOA while delivering value for the enterprise, certain controls are essential. Incorporating service discovery, service security, service management, and policy governance in a ubiquitous and transparent framework is essential to the success of any enterprise SOA deployment.

The creation and popularity of Web Services are growing rapidly in every industry. With this continued growth, more and more programmers find themselves writing code that, even if it's not currently packaged as a Web Service, will eventually be exposed as one.

Most organizations today have internal applications that span across different systems, networks, and technologies. These applications would provide more value to customers if only the data that they manage were exposed. In the past, this was often difficult due to the inability of systems to communicate with one other. However with Web service standards in place for several years now, services are finally gaining acceptance throughout the industry. Consequently, service-oriented architectures (SOAs) have finally come to fruition as companies start to rethink how they build enterprise applications.

The Stampede Web 2.0 Performance Series is the first enterprise application delivery solution specifically designed to accelerate and secure asynchronous Web 2.0 applications. With Stampede's expertise in building acceleration software solutions over a decade, the company has been able to come up with this cutting technology that injects additional performance and accelerated security to optimize and protect emerging client-centric applications that utilize SOA, XML and AJAX technologies.

TIBCO Software Inc. , today announced at TUCON 2006, the company's annual user conference, the general availability of TIBCO BusinessWorks(TM) 5.3, the latest release of the company's flagship integration solution designed to help customers easily unlock the true benefits offered by an enterprise-scale service-oriented architecture (SOA). With this new version, TIBCO offers additional support for emerging Web Services standards, greater flexibility to quickly create services with one-click user interface features, and integrated partner management support to help ensure service reuse across multiple trading partners.

TIBCO Software Inc. , today announced at TUCON 2006, the company's annual user conference, the launch of TIBCO Business Studio(TM), the first software offering in a series of role-based design technology targeting the business user. TIBCO Business Studio represents a unified Eclipse-based environment that integrates modeling, management and simulation to help facilitate collaboration between business and IT users and optimize processes, thereby decreasing time-to-market of enterprise projects.

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), one of the key technologies for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), has become the accepted mechanism for defining and executing business processes in a common vendor-neutral way. Companies ranging from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and BEA to smaller organizations such as Fuego and Lombardi have committed to BPEL as a building block for SOA. BPEL, which has been designed specifically for defining business processes, supports typical interactions such as synchronous and asynchronous operation invocation, sequential and parallel flows, message correlations, fault and compensation handlers and activities triggered by events. Business processes often require human interactions as well.

Mats Karlsson has announced the relase of TinyAjax, a Lightweight php5 AJAX library. Karlsson says, 'You don't have to write any javascript, but if you want you're free to do so and you can mix as you want, use TinyAjax automatically generated code and your own existing scripts. You can also export global functions and a class-functions in the same page.'

Coach Wei, Chairman, Founder and CTO of Nexaweb and the creator of the first commercial AJAX applications, has joined the 'Real-World AJAX' conference faculty. Wei will deliver his AJAX session entitled 'A New Approach to AJAX: Asynchronous Java + XML' during the June 5-6, 2006, New York City event.

'Stylus Studio 2006 Release 2 exemplifies our continued focus on delivering the most innovative products for solving XML data integration challenges,' said Carlo Innocenti, Program Manager of DataDirect Technologies XML Product Group. 'The new XML development tools and utilities, as well as significant performance and extensibility enhancements to our XML deployment adapter technologies, provide a very compelling, standards-based solution for working with heterogeneous data sources.'

Eric is responsible for directing and communicating IONA's technology roadmap, as well as its product strategy as it relates to standards adoption, architecture, and product design. He leads IONA's participation in all standardization activities, and has been involved in Web services standardization activities from the beginning.

SYS-CON Events (www.events.sys-con.com) announced that Rogue Wave Software will be one of the platinum sponsors of the SOA Web Services Edge Conference to take place June 5-6, 2006, at the historical Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. Cory Isaacson, president, Rogue Wave Software, a division of Quovadx, Inc., will host a presentation and demonstration on 'Achieving Optimal Application Performance in a SOA environment.'

Eric Pascarello, an Ajax expert, is the co-author of Ajax in Action, the bestselling Ajax book in the market and the author of JavaScript: Your Visual Blueprint for Building Dynamic Web Pages (2nd edition). Eric is the moderator of the HTML and JavaScript forum at JavaRanch and maintains an Ajax-based blog at radio.javaranch.c om/pascarello.

I'm the 'tech chair' of SYS-CON's 10th annual SOA and WebServices conference that will take place on June 5-6 in New York City. Last week I've invited Joel Spolsky to make a keynote speech at this event. Guess what, Joel has accepted my invitation! If you have a chance to attend this talk, you won't regret it. Joel is one of the most respected people in the software industry. He is a brilliant writer and speaker. Try not to miss this opportunity.

Gridlogix, a creator of XML Web Services-based integration solutions, announced the completion of the enterprise-wide integrated network for the eBay Denver data center, one of several regional mission-critical operations.

SYS-CON Events (www.event s.sys-con.com)announced today that the commercial open source company SugarCRM will be one of the four platinum sponsors of the Enterprise Open Source Conferenceto take place June 5-6, 2006, in New York City.

Stylus Studio announced the immediate availability of Stylus Studio 2006 Release 2 XML Enterprise Edition, the latest version of its award-winning XML IDE. The new release provides powerful new XML tools and utilities to simplify XML data integration tasks faced by developers. Software professionals can download a free trial of Stylus Studio 2006 Release 2 XML Enterprise Edition today.

Reactivity, independent XML Gateway company and Systemation, provider of SOA and Web services enabling technology and services in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg (Benelux), announced that its entire suite of Reactivity XML Gateways are now available in Benelux through a new distributor partnership.