The Western conception of time relentlessly flying forward is a key underpinning of many societies' continuous focus on improving things, becoming more efficient, getting ever better, and not wasting a minute in the process.

One can guess that this fixation on time's vigilant journey stems from an Age of Science that began several hundred years ago, and is epitomized by Cartesian clocks eternally moving their gears to the tune of a never-ending grind stretching in linear fashion out to near-eternity.

Yet the rotation of those very gears dramatically illustrate another conception, one of continuous cycles, endlessly returning home only to repeat themselves one more time. Whether one thinks of ancient Egyptian flood cycles, lunar calendars, or karmic birth and re-birth, the idea that continuous cycles run the universe (and our lives) is at once powerful, easily understood, and valid.

Both conceptions condescend from their ethereal heights to form a rather unbending and brutish reality for IT departments today. You need to design and deploy the most cutting-edge, customer-friendly, Web-centric, fast and efficient, fault-tolerant, real-time applications right now, and you had better be thinking in terms of application development cycles and the next iterations and upgrades that will come circling back to torment you before you know it.

IBM WebSphere was conceived to work these problems. Its emphasis on a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is its key enabler-once the SOA light goes on, it becomes easier to understand why you need to take this over-arching, strategic approach to delivering solutions that require a tremendous level of complex, tactical, nitty-gritty development. It's the SOA of Reality, and we're all flying through its cycles!

So, many enterprises have chosen IBM WebSphere to meet the challenges of this Cartesian-karmic existential reality. As the newly named Editor-in-Chief of WebSphere Journal, I can report that I am happy to do my part to continue the magazine's leadership as the leading independent editorial voice in the WebSphere community. (My predecessor, Jack Martin, has decided to devote his full energies to his growing consulting practice, and you can continue to reach him at jack@skc.com)

The challenges facing WebSphere developers can be broken into the strategic and the tactical. As we all know, WebSphere is not a product, it is a development environment. Yet this environment embraces an alphabet soup of IBM and third-party products and technologies that play an integral role within WebSphere.

So focusing on the tactical, WebSphere Journal has traditionally excelled in delivering top-notch articles written by your peers on how best to work with these products and technologies, as well as topics related to them. The magazine will continue to do so. For example, this month we have stories about products and topics such as XML, cooperative portlets, the Eclipse UI, Java, and peer recovery.

The magazine has addressed the strategic issues as well, whether through interviews or overarching articles. Our interview tradition continues this issue with our talk with Wily Technology and Barclays Bank. And, we have a strategic article on SOA that sets a high bar for strategic discussion of this most important of issues.

Increasingly known as "soa" rather than "s-o-a," the concept of a Service-Oriented Architecture is what will be driving IT management and programmers mad as an entire generation of application developers flies through too-short time while always cycling back to the same challenges.

It's no secret that a typical big website-whether an Intranet, a B2B supply-chain management system, or one serving consumers directly-is hardly a unified, lean-and-mean fightin' machine, but rather, is actually a welter and concatenation of mainframe legacies, client-server legacies, databases scattered throughout numerous resources and platforms, often with inconsistent user interfaces and functionality levels found throughout.

Those who have chosen to work within IBM WebSphere have made an important first step in addressing these problems and in avoiding similar problems in the future. And we certainly hope that reading WebSphere Journal is an important next step.

I can't promise that WebSphere Journal can solve all of your Web-centric design and deployment problems. I can't promise that it will ameliorate any of your Cartesian-karmic existential angst. I can say, however, that the magazine will remain an industry leader as we continue to fly - and cycle - through the SOA of reality.