September 17th, 2007
Scaling out like Technorati
My fellow World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, was also in Dalian, China for the “Meeting of New Champions” or “Summer Davos” as the Chinese like to call it. During Davos in January, I had the great misfortune of pitching Alfresco against Technorati in a competition between tech pioneer companies. As fantastically well as Alfresco is doing, Technorati has the temerity to compete against Google in blog search and win.
I got the chance to talk to Dave during the conference and ask him some questions on the technology and architecture behind Technorati, the internet blog search site. I thought that someone who could take ordinary computer components and build a huge internet architecture could possibly teach something to people running enterprise architectures that are puny in comparison.
September 14th, 2007
Jimmy Wales and Enterprise Wikis
At the Summer Davos in Dalian, China, I was able to speak to Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, about wikis in the enterprise. Wikipedia has become not only the world’s most popular wiki, but the ninth most popular web site in the world. Jimmy is here as a Young Global Leader with others that are defining where the world is going in the future.
Although wikis have become popular for people to collaborate on alternatives to encyclopedias, wikis can be used as tools to collaborate in the enterprise. Wikis are now being used to define product specifications, user documentation, policies and procedures. In addition, teams are using wikis to share ideas, discuss issues and define strategy. MediaWiki is the engine beneath Wikipedia and thus developed by the Wikipedia Foundation. It is available for anyone to use in their enterprise since it open source, so, I figured that Jimmy was a good person to ask about wikis in the enterprise.
September 14th, 2007
Summer Davos in Dalian China
Last week I was in Dalian, China for the World Economic Forum Inaugural Meeting of the New Champions. That’s a mouthful, so the Chinese simply called it the “Summer Davos”. It makes sense as this feels very much like Davos only a bit smaller and slightly more relaxed and less intimidating. It is still difficult to be really relaxed with some many diverse bright minds, but the scope of topics was more manageable the number of sessions made it easier to choose. There were still the same types of plenaries, panels, board room discussions and collaborative workshops. The focus was global, but the star of the show was China as the world’s manufacturer, major outsource destination, next consumer society, and next world economic power.
July 10th, 2007
REST-style architecture in the real world
A couple of weeks ago, I presented REST to the IT staff in the London division of a major US investment bank. Out of something like 100 people, only a small number of people had ever heard of REST. Yet this bank had invested in a REST to SOAP bridge to facilitate delivering product and market information over the web. Surprisingly, many people are building REST applications in business and aren’t even aware of it.
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July 9th, 2007
Microsoft’s 4th of July Trans-Atlantic assault on document standards
On what is normally a slow period for news, Microsoft launched a concerted campaign to displace ODF and PDF as document access and retention standards on both sides of the Atlantic. Microsoft has proposed and lobbied for OOXML as an alternative to ODF and XPS as an alternative to Adobe’s PDF. Having been burned by Open Document Format (ODF) in the past, Microsoft is leading a new campaign to influence standards bodies, lobby governments, and educate the public on the desperate need for new standards rather than or in addition to existing ones. A successful document standard will affect the access, usage and control of office documents and records for decades to come. The latest battles could be seen during the 4th of July week in Massachusetts, Florida and the United Kingdom.
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June 20th, 2007
Is Relational Relevant?
Last week, some friends of mine from Ingres, the early relational database management system, attended a retrospective on relational database systems held at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley with other database pioneers from Oracle, Informix, IBM and Sybase. I was an early employee at Ingres which was the second best selling relational database until it unwound itself and eventually got sold. Back in the 1980s when Ingres started, relational was one of the hot topics of computer science. Today the developments in the retrospective are treated with the same distance as World War II and viewed with the same level of relevance as assembler code despite their widespread use today.
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June 19th, 2007
Microsoft needs REST
Apparently, Microsoft is diverging from the rest of the Web 2.0 world on how to approach integration and mashups. REST (Representational State Transition) is an architectural style that is transforming how systems integrate together, but it isn’t a standard. The ATOM Publishing Protocol (APP) is a popular RESTful standard used by Google and Yahoo among others to integrated services and manage publishing of information. However, Microsoft has taken exception to APP that everyone else is adopting and chosen to build their own protocol.
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June 4th, 2007
McKinsey’s look into Web 2.0 in the enterprise
The collection of techniques and technologies known as Web 2.0 is really only just beginning to have an affect on the enterprise. We are in that phase of market development where in Web 1.0 enterprises just started to realize that the internet is the new brochureware. Enterprises are starting to say, “We want a conversation with our customers.” New employees coming into even some of the largest companies are saying that they want an experience like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube and those companies are listening. But how do they do that? And do they really know what Web 2.0 really is?
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June 4th, 2007
The opening of Web 2.0 service platforms
Last week I was in San Francisco bay area talking to several Web 2.0 companies about their APIs. Much has been written about Facebook’s new move to open up their platform to encourage others to help it evolve new services and I wanted to find out what services from Web 2.0 platforms are available. Using open platforms and APIs like this can be useful for enterprise applications as well as consumer-oriented sites. Talking to some of the sites that have services useful for the enterprise, I was a little surprised to find that many had no APIs or interfaces at all. It wasn’t likely that there were technical reasons for not having interfaces.
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May 25th, 2007
REST Battles SOAP for the Future of Information Services
There has been some subterranean discussion in the content management standards arena about what is the best way to support the interoperability of content services with applications. Should vendors support content services through the myriad of web services support layers that have been developed over the last decade? Or should we take a leap into the future with the simple REST architecture used by Amazon, Yahoo, Google and dozens of other web properties? The answer can affect how applications, developers and even consumers view information services. I don’t think it is going to be as simple as let’s do both.
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