IBF… Are We Seeing the Future of Microsoft SOA Client Architecture?

March 3, 2005 · 1 min read

IBF… Are We Seeing the Future of Microsoft SOA Client Architecture?

I attended a one-day workshop on the Information Bridge Framework (IBF) yesterday at the Microsoft Technology Center in Austin given by XML MVP Christoph Schittko.  IBF is very impressive… very, very impressive… very, very, very impressive.

The five-thousand-foot view of IBF shows a framework that supports the integration of enterprise data via web services or components, and Microsoft Office applications.  The 5-foot view of IBF seems to suggest a framework that while presently coupled to Office, could easily be the foundation for SOA client development for Windows apps.

This is no simple SDK. IBF ships with some serious tools and some serious infrastructure.  The  loosely coupled design of the framework is poetic.  The framework decouples user interface, service layers, query criteria, data views, controller logic… Even the definitions of the available services are abstracted away and provided by a meta data service (It's every thing you'd expect from a good Java app :).  Not to mention that it all-of-a-sudden seems to make SmartTags - those esoteric little gizmos - very relevant to a lot of day-to-day smart client development.  Just to sweeten the deal, the IBF install includes the BizTalk 2004 Mapper as its XSL transformation tool!

At some point during the presentation I started musing about how broadly applicable to building SOA clients this framework could become.  It doesn’t take too much imagination to see that IBF should be amenable to any SOA client - not just Office.  Sure, it's not there right now, but it's only the 1.5 version.

IBF is a huge leap forward in SOA client architecture.  I really wouldn’t be surprised if IBF or some variant becomes the basis for a lot of our work in building windows client apps sometime soon.

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Scott Bellware

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