Tibco Software plans a number of technology enhancements based on its ActiveMatrix service platform for SOA, including accommodations for IBM's WebSphere application server and the Ruby programming language.

Detailing improvements planned for the next 12 to 18 months, Tibco's Raghu Thiagarajan, director of product management and strategy, cited the planned release of an ActiveMatrix management agent for WebSphere. This will provide the ability to manage policies on the WebSphere platform from within the application server as opposed to outside the application server. This offers security benefits, Thiagarajan said at the Tibco User Conference (TUCON) in San Francisco last week.

Via the company's Virtualized SOA strategy, the company plans to support ActiveMatrix inside of an application server to bolster Java support as well. "The main benefit of that would be the ability to make your EJBs (Enterprise JavaBeans) much more transport- and location-independent," Thiagarajan said.

If an EJB is created as a Web service, it is a concrete service tied to a specific location. "If you virtualize it using ActiveMatrix, you get to move it around very efficiently," said Thiagarajan. Policy management can be built right into the application server, he said.

To bolster Ruby development, Tibco plans to add Ruby as a service type supported on ActiveMatrix. "We see Ruby as one of the key service types of the new breed of developer," Thiagarajan said.

Currently, Tibco supports Java and .Net service types, while Ruby developers lack a deployment environment, he said.

"ActiveMatrix provides a deployment environment for Ruby as well," said Thiagarajan.

SOA enablement for C++ as native container for ActiveMatrix also is eyed. "The point is that you should be able to take C++ code and be able wrap to it in an ActiveMatrix container," said Thiagarajan.

Extension of SCA (Service Component Architecture ) capabilities to Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation Web services platform is eyed. SCA is an SOA specification for transformation of IT assets into reusable services. WCF services could be composed in SCA.

"Right now, SCA is kind of a Java standard," Thiagarajan said.