According to some recent rumors, Red Hat seriously considers developing its SOA area. Internetnews.com informs us that Red Hat will be receiving a brand new SOA Service Modeler tool, designed by Thomas Erl himself, one of the most well-known experts in the service-oriented architecture and also author of several books in this domain.

Thomas said he expects Red Hat to built, develop and open source his tool, a fact that should contribute to the SOA's deployment. According to Erl's statements for internetnews.com :

"There is a real need to have some support for the specialized service-oriented analysis service modeling process that is required in a typical SOA delivery lifecycle to precede the physical design and development process that comes thereafter. This is a tool that is specifically designed to accommodate service modeling."

Red Hat also feels confident that the SOA Modeler tool will gain success and they also say this tool would bring significant improvements to the current management of services. Red Hat officials stated:

"What the invention does is help us to give to our customers some key technology that, when implemented, should simplify the development and management of services .This will go into open source so it'll have a fairly wide audience."

Another role that SOA Modeler should accomplish would be that of serving as a better example for what SOA represents. According to Erl people tend to assign SOA's meaning with that of Web Services. Erl says that the SOA Modeler he designed is not directly related to the Web Services Description Language (a.k.a. WSDL), even though WSDL is a major component of the Web Services domain. In his turn, Mark Little, technical development manager for Red Hat's SOA platform said that the connection people use to make between the SOA and Web services is completely wrong and that one can easily develop non-SOA applications with Web services just as easy as in any other distributed environment. He said that the SOA Modeler here attempts to fix this misconception and to make it easier for people to develop SOA without caring too much about the implementation details. Even though Red Hat did not mention this clearly, it seems that RH plans to release its forthcoming JBoss SOA platform by October.