Thus far we’ve been talking about the notion of unstructured content as a target source to SOA-based applications, but you can also think about this from the perspective of the end application itself -- the document as the endpoint, providing a framework for bringing together structured data, transactional data, relational data, as well as unstructured content, into a single document that comes to life.Let me back up and give you a little context on this. You mentioned the various documents that line workers, for example, need to utilize and consume as the basis for their jobs. Documents have unique value. Documents are portable. You can download a document locally, attach it to an email, associate it with a workflow, and share it into a team room. Documents are persistent. They exist over a period of time, and they provide very rich context. They're how you bring together disparate pieces of information into a cohesive context that people can understand.
The Apache CFX "Interoperability Framework" for SOA Project is ready. We really could have used CFX in the 2003 Comcast project where a Tomcat/MYSQL Web-Stack connected to many disparate blackboxes. The blackboxes were standalone "Inventory and Billing" transaction processing data centers aquired by Comcast during a five year burst of acquisitions. Of course, none of these blackboxes could talk to any other! Enter SOA with XMLHTTPRequest streams. 2002-2003. We needed CFX to scale!
