SOA and heterogeneous technology environmet: eggs and chicken problem

One of the use case for witch a SOA (ESB) solutions is recommended is when you have to manage a complex “technology heterogeneous” environment.

Well, I’m thinking about a good design for some new important feature to be added to our complex environment. Our environment is indeed complex, with wide impact, with heterogeneous needing, but it is quite homogeneous in technology. OK, it isn’t a monolithic system, it is build by a lot of part, but a lot of this part are java(2ee)/oracle based.

But the question is:do I like to keep my system so homogeneous? IOW if I invest a lot of money adding these new features to my system, which involve to use/review most of developed software, is it really the right choice to keep it all based on java?

I’m a java guru and fun using it as my main development language in last 10 years, but my answer is

NO

Why NO? Because if I take a look behind in the past I can see a lot of system architects answering “yes!” at same question 20 years ago substituting “Java” with “COBOL”. And a shudder come on my back…would I really sentence my system to be so strictly coupled with a single technology and loose flexibility and cool feature of newer technology? I’m not sure Java will become the next COBOL going to be static and legacy, but for sure, if I would answer yes I would be disown my ideas of “open system”.

There are so good languages and technologies kicking around, which probably solve better some kind of problem. Groovy, Scala and Ruby are the most famous, but we have also Erlang, Factor (with good ideas and a friend of mine behind), and even more legacy language like perl could have its place in some specific use cases. In general if something could be more productive or more flexible than java for some specific problem, I’d like to keep doors open. Randall did an interesting post saying java developers should learn other languages, I make a step over saying java developers should USE other languages

I’ve been always open to new technology and solution, would I miss my freedom of choice in favour of my beloved language? No, my freedom is much more important than java

Designing my new system I would use best technology and language for each part of the system. It’s always a good decision, the good news is integration of these parts could be seamless and painless, we haveSOA/ESB solution.

My conclusion is that isn’t necessary to have heterogeneous system to go for SOA, probably is the contrary: nowadays we need heterogeneous system to be time to market, to have easier maintenance, and so we need SOA to build and manage it.

SOA and heterogeneous technology environment seems to be the  eggs and chicken problem

Thoughts?