The other night I had an interesting dinner date: seated around me were an Oracle ACE Director (Mark) and two Oracle employees, experts on Oracle Coherence (Ewan) and Oracle Data Integrator (Craig) respectively. The dinner was the closing event for all presenters and ACE Directors attending the EMEA SOA Partner Community Forum, put together by Jürgen Kress. A great event, a fine dinner and even better dinner conversation. Apart from discussing the Bejing 2008 and London 2021 (that is not a typo, the gentlemen were fairly pessimistic about the construction schedules for most Olympic venues), Dutch and British politics, American peculiarities, the wonderful Dutch countryside etc. we inevitably found ourselves back on the topics most on our minds: grids and clustering, message and data transport and the likes. (more…)