Gartner held its Application Integration and Web Services Summit last week, and a flurry of SOA-related news came out of it.

Top of the list was the news that Tibco now offers a way to deploy quick, "tactical" SOAs through the latest version of its PortalBuilder, which minimizes custom coding and makes it possible to connect new Web services to legacy systems and packaged applications. Then,
GT Software rolled out a set of development tools designed to leverage existing technical resources and programmer skills, hopeing to help users pull mainframes in as more active participants in SOAs.

Then, Mindreef announced Mindreef Coral, a Web services lifecycle collaboration platform for organizations building Web services and SOAs; Forum Systems announced the Forum Vantage XML Accelerator, a new product designed to provide XML acceleration across networks for secure and optimized delivery of Web services; and AmberPoint announced the latest release of its governance software for managing and securing services-based applications.

In the how-to department, we had an excellent review of Forum System's XWall, which concludes that despite a high price tag, the product delivers effective XML firewall and virus scans for SOAP and attached payloads. And a review of Systinet's Registry 6.5 by Guest author Carl Ververs, a senior enterprise architect with ThoughtWorks, ends up praising the registry to the skies for the capabilities it provides to organizations attempting to implement SOAs.