Welcome back to WebSphere Journal. Good to see you, good to know that you're still engaging in web services, one of the more dynamic areas within all of technology today. Although there are a number of new acronyms emerging right now, the now-old standby SOA continues to drive a large measure of what's happening throughout IT shops.

We've taken a slightly different tack with a couple of the main features this issue by featuring features on a couple of emergent services, namely eBay and the Blackberry. Both represent what is now a clear trend in not only the technology world but the world as a whole these days, the trend toward involving vast communities as the primary drivers of the services that technology enables. IT management has been dealing with the issue of stovepiped applications for a couple of decades now, and frankly, vertically discrete apps and departments remain a pox within companies of all sizes, government agencies, and other institutions. Yet the emergence of communities clearly signals the end of the old order.

eBay and the Blackberry may not seem to be so similar on the surface, but they are in fact both services that reach multitudes of users on a point-to-point basis, delivered through applications that must present a single face to users and an absolute minimum of fiddling, or more technically, management overhead. And they represent an unselfconscious, community-building approach: no precious preening about the sanctity of "the community," no self-imposed barriers on what constitutes the community, no advocacy of what the community wants or needs. The community decides, whether members of it are buying stuff or checking their e-mail (or talking on the phone.)

This unself-conscious approach will be seen more and more as e-commerce of all stripes enters what is being called the Web 2.0 age, an age that can more prosaically be thought of as simply a long-awaited recovery from a trough caused by overspending on Y2K and unwarranted expectations by too many late 90s start-ups. WebSphere developers can learn from these examples, all the while remembering that these unified, seemingly simple customer interfaces and services are hardly lightweight. The robustness and, to use an ancient term, RAS, demanded by customer-facing apps is certainly no less than that demanded by the stovepiped apps of the past. (And though the term "lightweight" means different things to different people, it seems clear that the old maxim of "using the right tool for the job" is something that applies in the sphere of modern-day application development.)

Also in this issue, SOA remains as a high priority for many IT developers and managers, and we welcome back the beginning what should be several contributions from Perficient. Yes, many of the emergent, so-called Web 2.0 companies are lightweight in the extreme, have a coolness factor that is undeniable, and have been very impressive in driving initial traffic levels to their sites. At the end of the day, though, it will be serious companies such as eBay and Blackberry developer RIM who will emerge as the champions of the early 21st century. And only the best tools will build the best companies, it seems.

Open source continues to threaten all traditional vendors, and IBM has most recently reacted by launching an Open Ajax initiative that combines two of the more popular recent software development movements. So as we move through 2006 and the initial stages of recovery, it will be interesting to see just how the technology industry has been transformed, whether IBM can maintain its very solid leadership in the web services market, and how it will continue to do so.