Only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.
—Richard Nixon

I’m not sure exactly at what point I decided to write this book. I think the moment of inspiration came one night while sitting in the hot tub a couple years back. That day, I had spent considerable time working with the newest release (at the time) of JBoss jBPM. I was extremely fired up as I had explored its capabilities, and the more I dug under the covers, the more excited I became. Technically, as I considered its features, it provided all the capabilities we were looking for at HireRight for a business process management (BPM) product. However, the real challenge was, how would we integrate the solution with our existing products and applications?

Like a lot of companies, HireRight uses a mix of open source and commercial products. One of the main benefits of commercial products is that they tend to be all-inclusive in their feature set, and provide a consistent, and often comprehensive, set of capabilities. Open source products, however, tend to be more narrowly focused for solving specific needs. Thus, while jBPM may be an excellent BPM product, it’s not obvious how you might integrate that with a services and component framework such as provided by Apache Tuscany. Further, building a complete SOA stack or environment using open source products can be challenging, because SOA itself can be a nebulous objective. Mixing and matching the best-of-breed open source products into a single, consistent SOA platform is a tall order, as I’ve discovered. Devoting time to studying the benefits of SOA and putting those concepts into practice using open source products are what formed the basis for the knowledge I share in this book. My motivation was to contribute in some small way to the success of open source.

Like a lot of folks, I often felt guilty for using these outstanding open source products, yet I seldom found the time to contribute back to the community. Each time I presented a question in a forum or mail list and got back a plethora of responses, the guilt level went up. Not only was I using the product for free, but I was also receiving free, high-quality advice to boot (granted, HireRight does believe in assisting open source companies by purchasing support for products used in production, but that usually occurs long after our initial evaluation, when most questions and issues arise). Being a believer in the quality of open source products and the outstanding efforts of individuals who support them, I figured it was time to give something back—this was my motivation for writing this book.

When a debate emerges whether to go with an open source offering, I often point out that open source, contrary to popular belief, represents substantially less risk to the adopting company than going with a commercial alternative. Why? As we’ve seen lately, commercial companies often go out of business or get acquired. When either happens, it’s not uncommon for the products to be discontinued, or awkwardly merged into some other offering. Further, many commercial products have a very limited user base, if only because they charge so much to use the products that only large enterprises adopt them. Because the user base is smaller, the quality of the product is often substandard compared with comparable open source products, which enjoy a much broader user base (more users = more feedback). When working with commercial products, how often is it that you can communicate directly with the developers responsible for the code? Such interaction in the open source community is common. Of course, with open source, you also have access to the source code, and the hidden gems in the form of JUnit test cases—one of the best ways to learn an open source product.

My hope is that, by writing this book, I can help advance the adoption of these open source products, and the companies, organizations, or individuals that support them. I believe the benefits of SOA are real, and can be realized entirely through integrating best-of-breed open source products.