Category: Ajax
September 6th, 2008
The WOA story emerges as better outcomes sought for SOA
Over the summer the enterprise IT blogosphere was swept up in a conversation around the concepts that many are calling Web-Oriented Architecture, or WOA. A different way to think about service-oriented architecture, WOA extolls a different but related set of technologies, in particular how to apply them in specific ways to connect our systems together into the solutions we need to take on our daily business challenges. WOA offers the exciting and fast-growth promise of the Web 2.0 world, while SOA has been seen as struggling and encountering low engagement in most organizations.
For those just joining the conversation, SOA is the most common set of top-level organizing principles and technologies that enterprises use to organize and connect their IT systems. However, SOA is increasingly in the firing line for less-than-stellar results and lack of business alignment. Few promising solutions for this have emerged lately, with the increasingly notable exception of WOA. WOA describes a compelling new focus that can address many existing SOA issues, but is sometimes at odds with traditional IT and business thinking.
Along with different technology emphasis, WOA offers a compelling new perspective on service uptake and consumption and offers potent ways of thinking about business models that can directly drive innovation and growth. Even better, we can now point to existing WOA success stories, albeit most of them in the online world. In short, SOA (of which WOA is a part) hasn’t looked this interesting in years. But like most new ideas, it inevitably faces challenges from the old guard.
For its own part, far from being a boring, back-office story about plumbing and infrastructure, SOA has actually seen better results than most of the enterprise architecture models that came before it. However, these returns have been fairly lackluster compared to what most business were actually looking for and what SOA practitioners wanted and were actively trying to achieve, certainly when any measurements of the ROI were taken. My detailed WOA overview last April tells the story: The Burton Group ultimately concluded earlier this year that “that SOA is not working in most organizations” based on extensive conversations with clients.
I’ve covered this territory a number of times in the past, most notably with an in-depth exploration of What is WOA?, but the story remains the same: WOA is being driven by the widespread success that lightweight Web services — and particularly their use in open APIs — are having on the open Web. The broad lesson that has been dawning on the enterprise architecture world this year is that this is what’s actually working in terms of what SOA has been trying to accomplish, but with a uniquely different approach.
Explore several WOA success stories and how they are driving SOA.
The tide seems to be turning in terms of the industry’s perspective of WOA as well. Respected SOA expert David Linthicum recently asked “SOA out, WOA in?” and seemed to think it was, noting it will take a long time, like SOA did, to make inroads in the enterprise despite its widespread adoption on the Internet. ZDNet’s own Joe McKendrick recently noted that “WOA wins hands-down over SOA in popularity contest” and Dave Rosenberg recently discussed WOA on CNET and took it as a forgone conclusion. And this is a key point: Many organizations I talk to are already using some WOA to some degree on the ground today, it’s just not being promoted like traditional SOA is, thereby missing the benefit of the support, documentation, guidance, management, and infrastructure/tools support needed to fully flourish.
We have started to see traditional organizations begin to offer WOA-friendly services to the world at large. For example, the World Bank recently opened its Web API to developers using the increasingly popular Mashery service, which allows an organization to outsource their WOA. Of course, WOA can be used solely inside the firewall but some of the most interesting scenarios involve integration with business partners, on demand in a very agile, lightweight fashion.
And in the end, this is the challenge. The use of WOA on the technology side is only interesting if there is support for the business for the scenarios it encourages. You could convert all your Web services from SOAP or REST and be fully ready for the resulting stream of consumer and enterprise mashups, API customers, and hundreds of new business partners, but not if you’ve not redesigned your business a bit. This is also one key reason WOA isn’t synonymous with REST. WOA is architecture, both technical and business, while REST is a style building WOA services. The implications of WOA also go beyond REST to include other Web-oriented scenarios such as widgets, browser-based interfaces, and so on.
WOA entails both technology and business change
Unfortunately, many businesses have not yet absorbed the lessons of the Web 2.0 era and still look at the Web simply as a way to deliver Web pages. This limited view and understanding of the Web’s potential means that most organizations do not have it on the radar to link themselves together in the enterprise-wide and Web-wide ecosystems of creation and integration that WOA can enable. SOA has always been about connecting systems and people together and — at long last — we have a clear path to potentially wonderful outcomes in terms of unintended uses. This includes the ability to access business opportunities inside of time windows which would previously have been unattainable with our traditional, heavyweight SOA models. But only if we truly change the way we think about how to leverage the network.
One last thing, it’s important to remember that no small system can sustain contact with a large system for very long without being fundamentally changed by it. This is what is happening with businesses (the small system, no matter how large) and the Web today (the big system.) The intrinsic nature of the Web is driving major changes in how we create network-based products and services and is inexorably turning us into Web-oriented businesses. Businesses that want to be successful on this network without understanding its fundamental nature and capabilities are only delaying the time it takes to reach the full potential the Web offers.
In this way, WOA often describes network business models (such as open Web APIs) that often seem very foreign to non-Internet businesses but are powerfully aligned with the way that the Web works. These models are almost certainly essential to be successful and flourish in the modern competitive landscape on our networks today. In this way, too many organizations will ignore adding a WOA aspect to their SOA work until it’s too late and the ability to generate strong network effects in their industry is greatly reduced.
WOA is just one of a set of transformative new distribution models for network-based systems.
So how do organizations start down this route to investigate the WOA way of doing SOA and seeing if it works for them?
Like many aspects of Web 2.0, WOA is not complex or overly expensive, it’s a way of thinking about interacting over the network and all the classic SOA principles still apply, which just create and expose them differently.
- Learn about WOA. Study the technology (HTTP, REST, syndication, open Web APIs, widgets, metadata documentation, Ajax, mashups, JSON, etc.), as well as the business and implementation side, including partner ecosystems, developer support sites, monetization, and chargebacks.
- Adapt WOA to your organization. Every organization will have a landscape of existing SOA approaches and technologies that WOA approaches will need to be added to. Furthermore, WOA does little good unless you’re willing to use it for what it does well: Provide the fuel for RIA-powered portal applications, enterprise mashups, your public APIs, and so on. Begun working through how WOA security will work in your organization (inline or through HTTPS, for example) and other key starter issues that are (hopefully) already described in your SOA governance documents.
- Conduct a pilot. Validate the items in #2 with a small pilot. Select a mashup platform that works well for your organization and try it out. WOA enables SOA to be used in a much more agile, open, and effective manner, with the right tools involved but only in an environment that supports it all the way through the “stack” from browser, server, database, development tools, and management infrastructure.
What are your thoughts on WOA? Will this finally be where the rubber meets the road for many SOAs?
April 17th, 2008
Web 2.0 success stories driving WOA and informing SOA
The striking contrast between the stories that we’ve been hearing lately about the slow going of SOA initiatives in the enterprise and the vibrant and rapidly growing ecosystems similar to them on the consumer Web has been generating a lot of debate and discussion in the enterprise IT community recently. This discussion was brought into sharp relief when ZDNet colleague Joe McKendrick recently reported on Burton Group’s Anne Manes stating that it “has become clear to me that SOA is not working in most organizations“, based on a wide ranging study they performed.
It’s become clear that the SOA world will have to change some basic assumptions.This is just one data point of many recently showing the continued shortfalls we’ve experienced in trying to get our enterprise systems to work together in the ways that we would like. Organizations clearly want to leverage high levels of interoperability to seize new business opportunities, innovate on top of existing assets, and properly leverage the extensive landscape of software, data, and infrastructure that most organizations have accumulated in large quantities over the years. But we are still having a great deal of difficulty doing so and SOA investments are just not reaping the types of return on investments that most businesses would like to have.
Looking for answers on how to improve SOA
This has driven a search for new models since there’s little question that the core ideas behind SOA seem to be the right ones. Rather, it’s been how we’ve gone about designing and implementing SOAs that appears to be at the crux of the issue. As we look at the most successful examples of SOA actually working, we keep being drawn back to the Web itself, with companies such as Amazon and their highly successful Web Services Division (with hundreds of thousands of business consumers of their global SOA), Google and its numerous and varied open Web APIs from Google Maps to Google Data, eBay and billions of dollars in listings it generates through its public SOA, or the rise of applications like Twitter (which gets 10 times the use through its APIs than from its user inteface) and applications that are primarily used via their SOA presence. Then there is the increasingly widespread adoption by millions of users of a sort of “visual SOA” with Web widgets and gadgets as well the rapidly growing story of software mashups, aka composite applications in the SOA world. There are many more SOA-ish success stories like this on the Web, but few in the enterprise.
John Musser’s ProgrammableWeb remains the best directory for finding all the APIs that Web companies have contributed to the Global SOA. Over 700 APIs are listed currently.
So if so-called Web 2.0 companies — which value participation almost above all else, both from consumers and organizations that want to integrate them into their offerings — are seeing highly desirable levels of adoption and significant ROI, how can this help understand how to improve our efforts in the enterprise? Most new Web 2.0 applications start out life with an API since getting connected to partners that will help you grow and innovate is a well-known essential for success online today. Despite years of SOA, we still don’t focus on consumption and openness as fundamentally essential characteristics to building an internal partner ecosystem that have beat a path to your door to use the services you are offering to them to build upon.
One big issue, as I’ve written about in the past, is
January 3rd, 2008
12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008
The worlds of SOA, SaaS, and Web 2.0 have been swirling around each other for a couple of years now and in 2008 we’ll finally see these gel into a practical, modern vision of next generation enterprises. And a variety of forces are coming together to make 2008 the year that enterprises refit themselves for the 21st century.
The driving forces for change this year will be the aging of existing IT systems, the rise of up-and-coming new approaches such as highly capable new Web-based applications, mashups, collective intelligence powered business software, Web-oriented architectures, and last but certainly not least, social software. These are providing the raw materials to use upon the freshly cleared canvases many organizations are readying for themselves as many organizations begin to retool and upgrade. Even the IT foundations we’ve come to get so used to, such as the operating systems we’ve used for years, have recently evolved and not always in the direction we’re going. If nothing else, the ever-advancing computing environments of the workplace and the Web are encouraging us to move to newer and better models out of sheer momentum.
But the changes we’ll see happening in our organizations won’t just be ones that are imposed by necessity, many of them will be driven from the bottom up as we see more and more grassroots IT solutions sprouting up from the trenches of Web-savvy workers, while many existing initiatives, including traditional SOA efforts, intranets and portals, CRM, decision management, and many others get recast and sometimes entirely reinvented using the lessons we’ve learned from the Web 2.0 era over the last two years, with the leading factors being the large scale shift of control to users, lightweight new application types proven in efficacy and scale on the Web, and social computing with Web technologies.
1. SOA finally goes pragmatic, Web-oriented, and lightweight. We’ve heard this prediction before but in 2008 it will be one of the items front and center for IT departments for a variety of reasons. Many of the ponderous, heavyweight SOA initiatives still in existence will finally refactor their design principles and then their architectures to be much more lightweight and RESTful. The classic SOA principles will still apply but changes in how they are realized inside organizations will just reach the tipping point in 2008. One key driver is that organizations are increasingly tired of waiting for ROI on their SOA investments and the demand for change is pushing IT leaders to search for new, more effective approaches. Web-orientation has enabled SOA on the greater Web on a vast scale and gained credence for a critical mass of the SOA community.
Read about ongoing story of Web 2.0 and SOA convergence, which will be well under way by the end of 2008.
The bottom line: If a Web service/open API can’t be consumed in the browser, it will find itself relegated to the deep end of the back office, if not retired outright. That’s not to say that the infrastructure for SOAs is getting simplier or that browser consumption is the ultimate litmus test, it’s not. And as we’ll see below, high velocity, large scale governance will be required to get any use out of these new highly distributable models for projecting content and functionality to any point in the enterprise.
Pervasive syndication for enterprise data, particularly with ATOM and sometimes two way, will also be a bright spot this year but will remain a largely emerging story until 2009.
2. Enterprise search will remain broken or highly limited in most organizations. I’ve covered previously the many reasons why search can’t work in the typical enterprise without enormous effort and consequently this won’t be fixed for most organizations this year. However, good enterprise search is necessary to leverage the fast growing and woefully under-leveraged information warehoused in the vast acreages of most enterprise data centers. Workers are still left with literally no choice but to pull their information from the Web or sequentially rummage through various silos to piece together what they need instead of putting a few keywords in an enterprise search engine and scanning the results. The unfortunate news: The penetration of local search engines into enterprise data will only improve a handful of percentage points this year.
3. Security will become a major concern as Web 2.0 apps and SaaS make the edge of enterprises increasingly porous. In 2008 users will self-provision themselves with consumer Web applications across the firewall, more and more business information will be found out in the open in enterprise wikis, workers will spend more time in public social networking sites, and the very pliability of mashup-based applications will make it unclear where data comes from and where it’s going. This will make security around next generation platforms become a Read the rest of this entry »
December 27th, 2007
The top Enterprise Web 2.0 stories of 2007
Over the last year, we have witnessed the continuation of the steady movement of the mostly consumer-driven Web 2.0 phenomenon into the workplace that began as a trickle in 2006. Blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, social networking, end-user mashups, and even prediction markets saw their largest entry yet into businesses and institutions around the world. The platform wars may start to return in 2008 as Web 2.0 ideas taught companies how to turn an open platform into competitive advantage.The more technical side of Web 2.0 also began to see maturity as businesses started to rethink their service-oriented architectures to be more Web-like and the rich Internet application industry added many major new building blocks and platforms that push the envelope in terms of the kinds of interactive experiences the Web is able to deliver.
Last year’s Enterprise Web 2.0 watch phrase of “consumerization of the enterprise” was clearly evident in workplaces large and small this year, yet we also saw significant new shifts in the way we look at online platforms of all kinds to communicate, collaborate, be more productive, and innovate. You may recall that the Web 2.0 mantra of 2004-2006 was often focused on emergent uses of networks to harness collective intelligence and provide next generation user experiences on the Web. And like each successive generation of innovation on the Web and elsewhere, most early attempts to capitalize on these powerful new ideas were relatively unsuccessful, though the success stories (which resulted in half of the top 8 sites in the world at the moment) resulted in both superior products for the Web community to use and useful new techniques we could use to improve our own results.
In 2007, we also witnessed a new pragmatism as the Web 2.0 hype began to die down, the success stories emerged, and the non-so-successful continued to inform the industry with the lessons needed to navigate the rocky shoals of product development on the Web today. We also began to see Enterprise 2.0 make real penetration in business as well as social networking finally get some corporate respect and validation as a functional business tool that can bring tangible benefits to the workplace.
Read here for a recap on what Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are generally defined as.
2007 was also a year of innovation in the mobile Web space. The iPhone proved that mobile Web devices were still capable of near quantum leaps in improvement and innovation, Twitter demonstrated what was possible in the realm of truly network-oriented social software on mobile devices, and Google dramatically improved their mobile Web applications with innovative capabilities throughout the year, particularly with Google Maps Mobile. However, while the iPhone isn’t quite ready for enterprise use yet (though it will likely get their soon), both Twitter and Google Maps Mobile have become poster children for mobile consumer apps that have had successful cross-over to the business world as enormously useful tools in day to day work.
But a contrarian might say Read the rest of this entry »
October 16th, 2007
The 10 top challenges facing enterprise mashups
The promise of remixing existing online services and data into entirely new online applications in a rapid, inexpensive manner, often referred to as mashups, has captured the software industry’s imagination since the release of first major example, HousingMaps.com, in early 2005. Since then, mashups have offered the potential to finally make widespread software reuse a reality, enable SOA initiatives to achieve positive ROI, and radically drive down the cost of application development while satisfying large applications backlogs that plague organizations almost everywhere.
Applying mashups in a business settings is often referred to as “enterprise mashups” and recently we’ve finally begun to see the tools emerging to bring real mashup capabilities to consumers, business users, and IT professionals.
However, though anecdotal evidence seem to abound — there are a good number of stories about businesses creating isolated mashups here and there — and mashups are again getting placed on hot tech trends lists for 2008, we’re clearly still not yet seeing the flood of mashup-based apps inside of organizations despite their consistent and steadfast growth on the consumer Web.
ProgrammableWeb’s mashup graphs (left of page) currently reports that over 2,400 mashup-based apps currently exist.
The public Web of course has been a global laboratory for innovation for 15 years and it’s not surprising that experimentation and creativity in such a large pool of resources of people and services would generate some interesting outcomes like the several thousand mashup applications currently available. But the question has been: Where is the same result inside our organizations? Those same organizations that often desperately need software to solve a business problem for which software simply isn’t available — at least without extensive customization — because the typical business problem’s unique, situational nature. In previous posts I’ve discussed how spreadsheets are often the only end-user development tool available to the average person to meet this need today.
So what exactly is holding back enterprise mashups from becoming a more popular phenomena inside our organizations? This has been in contrast to many other aspects of Web 2.0 inside the enterprise, where openness, network effects, and radical power and simply are often driving extremely fast uptake and adoption of new apps and technologies. By many indications, mashups — particularly in the enterprise — have so far fallen short of their potential and the question is why?
I’ve discussed this with a various people in the mashup community and analyzed a number of the leading mashup platforms and have boiled the outstanding challenges down to Read the rest of this entry »
August 27th, 2007
A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise, Part 2
A new survey of the personal use of Web 2.0 applications by CIOs emerged late last week and provided another interesting, if high-level, datapoint about the future of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Carried out by CIO Insight, the survey reported the usual trends like high rates of use of wikis, blogs, and RSS, as well as a few unexpected outliers, like 39% of CIOs listen to podcasts.
More than one large company has discovered that external customer communities provide better support to their own customers.Like most surveys, however, the questions tend to be leading and prevent unpredicted trends emerge naturally. Consequently, the numbers in this survey look somewhat different from the larger, more intention-based results from McKinsey’s global Web 2.0 survey earlier this year.
In terms of current trends, Silicon Valley proper has for the most part become thoroughly bored with the Web 2.0 meme despite the largely superficial presence of the most powerful Web 2.0 concepts in many online products and services.
At the same time, mainstream business is just now getting ready for Web 2.0 adoption and are beginning to incorporate the underlying technologies, platforms, and concepts into their IT departments and lines of business, though they too are often focusing on the low hanging fruit. But pilot projects now abound in businesses large and small around the world and even some concerted large-scale Web 2.0 projects and Enterprise 2.0 rollouts are under way in leading-edge organizations. Business and IT leaders on the sidelines continue to seek early results and evidence of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to applying Web 2.0 to their respective situations.
Surveys do help paint a picture of what’s taking place in the large marketplace and, judiciously used, can help us make better decisions. Unfortunately, most of the current crop of Web 2.0 surveys appear to be focused on specific technologies and applications of Web 2.0 instead of the deeper and more disruptive business models and approaches.
For example, crowdsourcing is just one example of how to use the fundamental power of the global Web to change the size, scope, and even the very nature of an organization’s productive output. Yet crowdsourcing hasn’t made the cut in any of the Web 2.0 surveys I’ve come across so far despite its proven game-changing potential.
A fairly well known story, crowdsourcing in the large in its earliest form has already shown that it can disrupt an entire, established industry. I’m talking about the rise of open source software, one of the early and effective proofs that crowdsourcing could be applied to a tricky business problem — creating competitive software cheaply by using virtually free labor capacity on the Internet — resulted in a nearly unending stream of high-quality, innovative products in the form of application software, databases, and even entire operating systems.
The crowdsourcing link above takes you to Wikipedia and will list many innovative examples of how organizations are taking it beyond software creation and enabling large communities of people on the Internet to generate outcomes that are often impossible in any other way. This is one of the more dramatic and powerfully business models that Web 2.0 makes possible when one tries to harness collective intelligence, one of the core ideas of Web 2.0 and probably the one most rife with long term implications for business and society. Yet only the McKinsey survey above cited this prospect in any recognizable way in its survey.
The point I’m making here is that Read the rest of this entry »
July 26th, 2007
A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise
For well over a year now we’ve seen reports and announcements from a major industry analyst firms and others tracking the movement of Web 2.0 ideas into the enterprise. Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, and many others have all weighed in on the trends or made recommendations, sometimes cautious and sometimes optimistic, that organizations should start heading down the Web 2.0 path. And public interest in Web 2.0 in the enterprise is widespread too, not in the least exemplified by the fact that Web 2.0 trends of all kinds — business and consumer both — are tracked closely here in many blogs on ZDNet.
This reflects the fact that the majority of productive power is on the edge of our networks and always has been.We’ve also seen that the term itself has moved from passing familiarity in the leading edge of the technical community to nearly universal recognition in both IT and mainstream business circles. That Web 2.0 is a complex topic there is little doubt since it’s often described as a grab bag category of the latest ideas and movements that include — but are by no means limited to– wikis, blogs, RSS, podcasting, content tagging, mashups, and social networking.
The big question? What do you really need to know today about Web 2.0 in the enterprise?
Reducing all of these ideas into an underlying set of principles is what people like Tim O’Reilly have been doing for several years now. It’s generally understood by most people that the Internet has changed considerably in the last half-decade and that those changes have reached a tipping point that’s enabling brand new business models, unleashing a wave of innovative products, influencing public behavior on a large scale, and in particular, resulting in entirely new types of online businesses. But as I discussed in last year’s discussion on Web 2.0 reductionism, trying to get at the core motive force behind things as disparate as rich user experiences and collective intelligence is no small task.
Fortunately, we are indeed as an industry starting to get a handle on how all the pieces of Web 2.0 fit together. For instance, it’s now clear that having hundreds of millions of people globally connected together pervasively via one single high speed two-way network (aka the Internet) will result in many of the things we’re now seeing in the marketplace. It seems a fundamental new widespread focus on leveraging that two-way aspect of the network deeply in our online products, as well as increasingly playing to the fundamental strengths of the network that is the Web, is teaching us invaluable lesson after invaluable new lesson for our businesses. The result is that the living laboratory of the Web is now the source of the greater part of our innovation in business these days. Today’s World Wide Web is a larger ecosystem and with far more brainpower and activity that any single organization could ever hope to match.
Web 2.0 Transforms The Business Landscape
The story of Web 2.0 began with things like open source software, which is nothing more than entire products created ad hoc by volunteer armies of contributors that now outnumber — by virtue of the sheer capacity the network — the world of commercial software efforts. It’s not lost on careful watchers that open source software tends to be more feature rich, secure, and bug free that commercial software, despite being created by thousands of loosely coupled, self-selected contributors. Since then, this idea of commons-based peer production of products on the global Internet has spread through just about every other type of product that can be delivered over the Web from marketing, advertising, collaboration, news, customer service to banking, investment, fund raising, disaster management, and dozens of other types of business and civic activities. This reflects the fact that the majority of productive power is on the edge of our networks and always has been. We’ve tinkered for a couple of decades to build good networked software that took advantage of this fact but we didn’t yet have enough knowledge of the best techniques for creating them. That things like peer production are now moving to the center of the design of online products finally shows a maturing realization that our older, more traditional views of networked applications were just not effective as they could be.
Combine the rise of peer production with the Web growing up into a true software platform as part of the rise of rich user experiences and SaaS. Then witness the movement of the Web out into the world in the last few years and exploding into thousands of types of new Internet devices, mobile and otherwise, that deliver — and just as importantly if not more — capture value in every corner of the globe and in every conceivable setting.
An overarching and compelling new business vision
And while there more trends beyond these that are driving Web 2.0, the upshot is that the productive capacity of the world is increasingly wired into the Web and can be leveraged by building online products that encourage the close cooperation and involvement of those at the edge of the network. You can get now people on the Web en masse to build innovative software applications or help you accumulate vast and almost infinitely rich databases of information and even foster enormous online populations for which you are the preferred intermediary and of which you can tap the combined intelligence.
It’s this more comprehensive and integrated vision of Web 2.0 and its ingredients consisting of Read the rest of this entry »
July 23rd, 2007
A bumper crop of new mashup platforms
While application developers tend to roll their eyes at the concept of end-user mashups, they remain one of the more promising new trends in software development this year. And while it’s certainly true it’s early days yet for mashups, the tools that enable them remaining rather limited, seems to be changing as I regularly come across compelling new mashup platforms as well as upgrades to existing ones that show what will be possible soon. And for now, as evidenced recently in the McKinsey Web 2.0 in business survey where 21% of organizations globally said they are using or planning to use mashups, there appears to be considerable demand for mashups at the enterprise level even though the majority of existing offerings are primarily aimed at the consumer space. Is this disconnect resolving with the current crop of offerings? Let’s take a look.
In today’s mashup world, the apparent business potential of highly accessible and easy-to-use mashup creation tools like Yahoo! Pipes and Microsoft’s PopFly is still undermined by their apparent lack of readiness for the enterprise. Mashups could theoretically allow business users to move — when appropriate — from their current so-called “end-user development tools” such as Microsoft Excel that are highly isolated and poorly integrated to much more deeply integrated models that are more Web-based and hence more open, collaborative, reusable, shareable, and in general make better use of existing sources of content and functionality. Remember, business workers still spend a significant amount of time manually integrating together the data in their ever increasing number of business applications. Tools that could let thousands of workers solve their situational software integration problems on the spot themselves, instead of waiting (sometimes forever) for IT to provide a solution, is indeed a potent vision.
So what’s typically missing from today’s mashup platforms to make them both useful and desirable in the enterprise? While no one knows for sure, since mashups are just starting to be considered seriously in many organizations, it generally boils down to 1) deep access to existing enterprise services and data/content repositories, 2) SaaS-style Web-based mashup assembly and use, 3) assembly models that are truly end-user friendly with very little training required, 4) a credible management and maintenance story for IT departments that must support a flood of public end-user built and integrated apps, and last but certainly not least, 5) mashup products that address important questions about mashups and enterprise security. None of these are particularly easy to solve, which is most likely why mashups haven’t been more prevalent before now.
This latter issue of security — in terms of reliably securing applications that are created largely out of other services and applications — can’t be understated and will likely determine whether an mashup platform can even be considered for adoption in a given organization. This is particularly crucial since the Global SOA, the vast landscape of open functionality and content on the Web, now provides a truly massive yet rather security-challenged set of source of material for enterprise mashups. The question here is whether Web apps that are assembled by users — and not developers or security experts — and that combine capabilities from a wide variety of sources including the open Web can ever be made safe enough for most businesses? That’s an important open question and one that few of the mashup platforms listed below spend much time addressing.
Are mashups really a major new development model? Read a detailed discussion.
The answers to these questions will inevitably shake out as the existing mashups products get applied to real business problems and the industry collectively learns what capabilities and approaches are needed for them to be successful. And I don’t expect it will be a one size-fits-all either; mashups can be approached many different ways, from the pure service mashup models of RSSBus and Kapow’s RoboMaker to the innovative yet very end-user friendly wiki model that IBM’s QEDWiki takes.
I’ve been been tracking many of these new or evolving mashup platforms and thought I’d compile my take of the leading players in the mashup space today, particularly given the number of new or significantly upgraded products in the last few months. To make the cut, all the products listed below had to allow live integration of functionality or content (data) over a network, provide an easy-to-use development model that is theoretically accessible by end-users, be available in at least beta form, and either consume and/or produce Web-based applications and services. Using this refined selection model, you’ll see this list looks a bit different from last year’s round-up of mashup platforms. Yet despite the removal of a few products, the list is bigger than Read the rest of this entry »
May 17th, 2007
The story of Web 2.0 and SOA continues - Part 1
It’s nearly the middle of 2007 already and I’ve had occasion to sit down and look at where Web 2.0 and SOA software models have evolved lately. Partly it’s because we’re now seeing some of the bigger software companies seriously embrace lightweight SOA recently, and it’s also because we’re continuing to see more clearly that Web 2.0 and SOA really are largely (but not 100%) the same concepts that merely lay on different — if fairly different — parts of the software continuum. Here’s the latest on this story.
For those not up-to-date on this trend, the fact that these two big conceptual foundations in the software business overlap extensively — and somewhat unexpectedly — appears to be a pretty important subject for a number of reasons. One is that SOA is the dominant design paradigm in business software today, with most software development projects using some subset of it as their primary organizing principle. The core principle of SOA is the decomposition of software into sets of services which can be used and composed into new applications that have a very high level of integration and reuse.
The second reason this convergence is important is that potent ideas in Web 2.0 have been mapped back from what seems to be working best on the often unruly, much less-organized, but considerably larger Web. Web 2.0 is more of a pragmatic extraction of what actually works best in online product design than a rigorous a priori engineering exercise. That both have arrived at largely the same endpoints on their own, but with very different priorities and focus in some areas, should not be understated.
SOA and Web 2.0 have also crossed over considerably around Rich Internet Applications and Ajax. Read ZDNet’s Joe McKendrick recent post for the latest on this story.
I’ve written in the past about the considerable overlap and convergence of these two popular software models. From my contrived or converging article exploring the early possibilities to my first Venn diagram showing the similarities and differences, it’s been clear that Web 2.0 and SOA are closely related. Understanding the exact demarcations and differences between the two, however, is driven by a couple of realizations. One is that from a product design perspective, understanding the advantages and disadvantages of each method prescribed for creating your software can dramatically effect what an online product can do in the market or for your business internally. Go with traditional SOA and you’ll be able to leverage the advantages that its design center confers. Go with Web 2.0 ideas, and you’ll be able to take on a different set of challenges and be successful in a very different environment and for different reasons. But make no mistake, it’s fairly clear that choosing one of the other can really matter to a project’s or product’s ultimate success.
Both conceptions do make one very important assumption, that all software is part of a larger ecosystem bigger than itself. This idea has been with us for a while, ever since distributed computing. But the focus of software ecosystems has continued to move around over the years, from computing, to services, to data itself. What’s the real core? What’s the most important aspect of our applications? The O’Reilly concept of Web 2.0 tells us that data is one of the most important parts of our software applications these days, and this is backed up by citing one world leading product after another that took this idea seriously. SOA tells us that services are the center of composition. That services in a SOA also transport data is also important, but the focus in traditional SOA tends to be much more on the seams of our IT systems than what makes them the most valuable overall. These may be seemingly academic distinctions but the ongoing struggle of SOA implementation in many organizations and the runaway success of many a Web 2.0 application hints that this may indeed be some very important hair splitting.
To show how SOA and Web 2.0 line up when compared to each other, I’ve included in the diagram above my most recent update depicting the overlap and convergence of the ideas in Web 2.0 and SOA. It paints a clear picture of what the two have in common and how they are different as well. Note: No depiction like this could be complete and this is very much a work in progress. For this version, I’ve recently added security and monetization as two core aspects that SOA and Web 2.0 share, but with varying degrees of importance (SOA cares more about security, Web 2.0 cares more about monetization of products and services.)
Another important item: The bottom of the overlapping circle contains a cryptic Read the rest of this entry »
May 14th, 2007
Mashups: The next major new software development model?
At last week's Mashup Ecosystem Summit held in San Francisco and sponsored by IBM with an invited assemblage of leading players in this space, I gave an opening talk about the current challenges and opportunities of mashups. And there I posed the title of this post as a statement instead of a question. The reason that it's a question here is entirely driven by the context of who is currently creating the majority of mashups these days. Because even a cursory examination of what people are doing every day on the Web right now tells us that mashups — also known as ad hoc Web sites created on the fly out of other Web sites — are indeed happening in a large way, albeit in simple forms, by the tens of thousands online every day.
The consumerization of the enterprise as younger workers bring their Web 2.0 skills and habits to work has already begun.But inside our organizations, both in the IT department and in business units, mashups are a much rarer phenomenon. And in fact, this is one of the classic hallmarks of the Web 2.0 era; the much larger community of the Web as a major source of innovation and leading edge behavior that subsequently moves across the firewall and into our workplaces.
However, the topic of this blog is aimed at the application of Web 2.0 to the enterprise and so whether mashups will be a significant new model for application development inside our businesses anytime soon is still somewhat of an open question. It's worth noting that McKinsey's recent global executive survey of Web 2.0 in business said that a whopping 21% of large businesses across the board are planning investment in mashups in 2007, but a sobering 54% of business executives also said mashups were not even under consideration. Understanding the timing on mashup adoption therefore is important along with the challenge of communicating their potential.
Since the mashup story is primarily being driven by spontaneous activity at the edge of the Internet, an accurate and updated picture of what's actually happening with them is harder to make out than if it was being driven by a centralized industry effort. And as it turns out, this makes what's happening richer and more exciting than it would be otherwise while at the same providing significant challenges for those that want to take these compelling ideas and apply them deliberately to solve business problems.
So in the interest of making sure we have the broadest industry discussion we can about mashups — and to make sure there is some kind of snapshot of what we think we're seeing in this space — I thought I'd summarize the notes from my talk at the Mashup Ecosystem Summit.
To bring folks that are just joining the mashup conversation up to speed on why mashups are so exciting, I'll start with my take on the key aspects of mashups from a value proposition perspective.
Key Aspects and Benefits of the Mashup Approach
- Effective leverage of Web parts and the Global SOA. Mashups are generally built out of the bits, pieces, and services of other Web applications that already exist, adding code only when it can't be sourced from internal or external suppliers or to provide integration "glue" between the parts. This reuse can quickly and easily leverage millions of dollars in previous investment and results in a
An internationally recognized enterprise architect and business strategist, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. You can follow Dion on Twitter.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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