SOA Applications as Objects

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) derive their potential from extending the Object Oriented (OO) paradigm as well as some facets of Aspect Oriented (AO) programming to the level of applications and/or whole systems. The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is one part of SOAs that can provide a starting point on which to build an SOA or Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) substructure and can provide an insightful view to begin understanding how SOAs work.
One interesting open source ESB named Mule is a good example of a foundation on which an organization can begin to implement a SOA.

Language versus Thought in 2007

If the semantic structure of a language influences the thoughts and ideas of its users and vice versa, then how and to what degree? Over a decade ago John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson looked at such questions in a work entitled “Rethinking Linguistic Relativity” which examined much earlier works by linguists attempting to explain how thought and language interact. In 2007 and beyond, such research is and will be fundamental to our understanding of things like online Web 2.0 collaborations, artificial intelligence, semantic web applications, internationalization tasks, and just about any other activity that primarily involves communication between people using language. Similarly, some have suggested (e.g. in books like “Thinking in Java” and the like) that ideas and/or thought in software engineering are governed to some degree by the structure and/or semantics of programming languages themselves and that they are not to be compared simply in terms of efficiency or other such criteria.