2008 SOA magazine readers choice

I'm personally a bit dubious about the readers choice result from SOA magazine ( http://soa.sys-con.com ) since it gives very high rankings to IBM websphere software.

Some make sense and some don't.
Best App server:

1. IBM websphere (yeah, huge number of commercial, plus ambigous since this includes WASCE and probably Apache Geronimo)
   
2. Glassfish (big push from SUN)
   
3. Weblogic (ol' favorite, but Oracle owns this now and god knows how they market it)
   
4. WSO2 (** weird?? Where did this come from? Maybe manipulation?)
   
5. JBoss (huh, would have thought this near #2 or #4)

Best IDE

1. NetBeans (assuming 6.1, which is excellent)
   
2. Rational Application Developer (eclipse)
   
3. Oracle JDeveloper (not eclipse)
   

What's weird is where are all the other Eclipse-oid based IDE's?

Best Integration Server

1. Websphere Integration Developer
2. Fiorano ESB
3. Java CAPS (glassfish++)

Agree with IBM being the big gorilla here. What's surprising is the gain of Sun servers, which traditionally are a pile of dog sh*t (since Sun never seemed to understand the enterprise and hence the dogs breakfast of J2EE 1.3/1.4)

Best Opensource SOA

1. WASCE (does this include Apache Geronimo??)
   
2. Sun openESB
3. SoapUI

Since where was WASCE SOA? This is yet another Java EE server. Also what the heck is SoapUI doing here? This is just a test/development IDE (although as a JNLP java applet)

Best Portal

1. IBM Websphere Portal
2. Sun Portal
3. Weblogic Portal 10.2

Yeah yea, Websphere blah blah. IBM must have stacked the whole review with their internal staff. or fanboys. Still surprising Sun is in the list. Maybe they gave staff a couple of hours to fill the survey too :-)



Best Security

1. IBM Datapower XML security gateway XS40
2. Sun access manager/open SSO
3. oracle web services management
4. Metro

No surprises about IBM, Datapower is a damned good appliance. IBM liked it so much they bought the company. Big surprise to see Sun in there twice (#2 and #4). Though metro is actually quite good.

Best SOA platform

1. IBM Websphere
2. Fiorano SOA
3. Sun Java CAPS

IBM, IBM, IBM, IBM. Sigh, this report is so biased it's getting tedious.

Best SOA Testing tool

1. Rational Tester for SOA
2. SoapUI

Ditto. Though rational is pretty good, SoapUI is a hell of a lot more lightweight, yet pays it's way (the community edition is free :-). Could do with more test management though.

Best SOA Tool

1. Fiorano ESB
2. Sun Java CAPS
3. Rational Software Architect
4. Rational Team concert

What, IBM *NOT* at the top? Someone at IBM messed up (and probably got forced to move to Bangaldore as punishment).
It's a bit weird to mix development tools (#3 RSA & #4 Rational Team) with servers (#1, #2). Maybe that's why IBM got pushed down, staff got confused..

Best SOA training site

1. IBM SOA Sandbox
2. SOA Training Curriculum (MomentumSI)

IBM SOA Sandbox is great, so this choice actually makes sense.

Best SOA Book

1. IBM"The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0"
2. Amberpoint et al An Implementorﾒs Guide to SOA ﾖ Getting it Right
3. IONA Understanding SOA with Web Services

All vendor "books". Basically a "white" paper advertorial disguised as a book.

Best SOA or XML Site:

1. IBM's SOA Microsite
2. www.fiorano.com

Yeah they are ok. What about non-vendor stuff.

Con-clusion:

sys-con SOAWorld magazine tries to be a vendor neutral but they need some mechanism to do a real unbiased report. Maybe if Gartner or any of the reputable firms would run the survey I would be less skeptical.