05.09.08
Posted in Java, Application Development, Rich Internet Apps., Web 2.0 Apps at 9:21 am by Tony Baer
While our overriding impression was that the Rich Internet Application was the predominant theme of this year’s JavaOne, we did stumble across one potentially interesting server development. Caucho, a 10-year old firm that we’ve never heard of, has recently reached a major milestone in its 3-year effort porting PHP over to Java. That is, it’s taken the underlying constructs of PHP, which are written in C and C++, and reimplemented them in Java. The result is kind of you-can-have-it-both-ways deployment platform for PHP.
The result is Resin, an open source appserver that lets you write your web app in PHP, but run it on a server that takes advantages of most (not all) of the Java EE services of brand name appserver platforms. In other words, you get the reliability, load balancing, and other bulletproofing features of Java EE, but you don’t have to write Java. It’s drawn several major PHP sites, which the company cannot disclose, but does brag how Japan’s largest online gaming portal migrated from Tomcat to Resin.
Caucho doesn’t claim to have the job finished; in fact, given the impedance mismatches between PHP and Java, it never will be a 100% artifact-for-artifact translation. For starters, there’s the immaturity and rough edges of PHP, which still isn’t fully documented and has its share of bugs. But the company has attained compatibility with PHP 6 and now supports some of its most popular apps like the Drupal social networking-oriented content management system, Wordpress blogging platform, and MediaWiki engine that powers Wikipedia.
We never heard about Caucho before, but given PHP’s popularity and the current tooling vacuum surrounding it, we couldn’t ignore these obscure folks. PHP and other dynamic scripting languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby have emerged as responses to Java’s complexity. In essence, Caucho Resin is yet one of a number of responses (like “rebel” frameworks such as Spring or Hibernate) to the complexity of Java EE – and the idea of writing PHP appservers seems to be catching. Reportedly, IBM is also pursuing the idea.
Watch this space.
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Posted in Java, Application Development, Mobile, SOA & Web Services, Rich Internet Apps., Web 2.0 Apps at 1:02 am by Tony Baer
JavaOne provides a good barometer of the current fads hitting IT. Three years ago, Java discovered open source; two years ago, it was Ajax; while last year was a non-event. But this year, the rich client’s back, baby.
In fact, this being our tenth JavaOne (which we covered remotely this year – too much darn travel), the spotlight on the client was déjà vu all over again. Covering our first JavaOne back in 1998, most of the booth traffic was around demos showing Java applets adding animation to word, numbers, and pictures on the browser. Ironically, we could have cared less about the animated browsers; instead what piqued our attention was this startup company called WebLogic, which made a bet on Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) before the standard was approved. More importantly, their message was, forget the animations, the true value of Java was back on the server.
You know the rest of the story. Java’s early stab at rich client fell prey to bandwidth hurdles (those were the days of dial-up) and the nagging issue of browser compatibility. The Flash runtime stole eventually the thunder, literally.
But we digress.
This year’s appearance by Neil Young set the tone: it’s all about really rich multimedia, the type of stuff where Plain Old Ajax (POA?) runs out of gas. Yes, Sun made some announcements about its open source Glassfish appserver (a new telco edition was coming out), but this year’s big announcement was the roadmap for JavaFX, the rich Java client framework that Sun first announced last year.
Thanks to Neil Young, JavaOne made the news, but the news was hardly about Java. The headlines read, Neil Young is beginning release of his entire music and video archives on Blu-Ray, making it the first serious music collection to hit the new high-def DVD format. But it was funny seeing pictures showing Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz barely squeezed into the frame as a rock fan. The Java connection? Java lets you have a real interactive experience with Blu-Ray, rather than the rudimentary front, back, right, left navigation you get with run of the mill DVDs.
Back to JavaFX, it’s Sun’s all-Java answer to Adobe Flex/AIR and Microsoft Silverlight. To recap, JavaFX is a programming framework for accessing the rich media capabilities that to some extent were already part of the Java SE desktop spec, plus new ones such as the streaming audio and video codecs from On2 that Sun just announced it was licensing. And with the whole deal is yet another new scripting language, JavaFX Script, which would make all the rich media capabilities of Java accessible to web designers. Just like Microsoft Silverlight, and its associated scripting languages, this is yet another play for the Adobe Dreamweaver crowd.
During the keynote, Sun splashed demos showing screen renderings of the kinds of spinning, 3D spheres that for us rekindled memories of demos of the first multimedia PCs of the early 90s, and the finite element model renderings of CADCAM systems using souped-up graphics cards a few years before that. Some demos never change. We also saw a demo of Java applets (remember them?) being dragged and dropped off the browser to the desktop, where you could persist them as a regular local app –- which in its own weird way could be construed as Sun buying into Microsoft’s Software + Services vision blending the cloud with local client.
Ever since Sun hatched JavaFX a year ago, we wondered about why the world needed yet another multi-platform rich client framework, as Adobe would have proven a convenient multi-platform partner. But that was based on the dated perception of Sun viewing Microsoft as its primary rival. In fact, it’s much more nuanced picture, given (1) Sun’s and Microsoft’s interoperability détente; (2) the increasingly intense rivalry between NetBeans and Eclipse for Java development platforms; and (3) competition for the hearts and minds of Rich Internet Application (RIA) developers and designers, where for now it’s advantage Adobe.
And that’s where you get into a battle of lies, damn lies, and statistics. Sun and Adobe are battling over whose runtime is more ubiquitous in the connected world. Adobe claims that the Flash Player reaches over 98% of Internet-enabled desktops in “mature” economies (the number drops to 97% when rest of world is factored in), compared to 84% for Java. Sun counters that the JVM is on 90.7% of all Internet-connected desktops, plus virtually all smart phones produced within the last three years. Well not quite. The iPhone is expressly omits Java support, and of course, there are Windows Smart Phones. Adobe has Flash Lite for mobile devices, but it hasn’t published studies showing killer penetration.
Nonetheless, when you parse the numbers and statements, it’s clear that Sun views Adobe as it main rival for the Rich Internet client. JavaFX is Sun’s stake in the ground for its argument that the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is the place to do your multimedia, rather than the Flash plug-in. And that’s why Sun is trying to reopen the barn door, even after some of the horses have galloped out.
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05.08.08
Posted in Application Development, Middleware, IT Infrastructure, SOA & Web Services, Enterprise Applications, Enterprise Integration, ITIL at 11:11 am by Tony Baer
All too often, when I come across one of Todd Biske’s writings, my conclusion is, “Why didn’t I ever think of that?” As a former colleague on the weekly BriefingsDirect podcasts, you could always count on Biske to come up with common sense insights that were so basic that they never occurred to you. In his latest post, The Future of ESBs, he reiterates a conclusion he came to some time ago, that “the capabilities associated with the [ESB] space really belong in the hands of operations rather than the hands of developers.” That’s because when you eliminate all the extraneous embellishments of the definition of what ESBs are, at the end of the day, they are all about connecting services. Nothing more, nothing less. He adds that when you really compare costs (and we presume, benefits) of ESBs, it should be with that of other network intermediaries, such as switches, load balancers, and proxying appliances – rather than the software-based offerings of middleware providers who dominate the ESB market.
The dilemma of course is that the network folks have had difficulty navigating up the stack. Recall Cisco’s Application-Oriented Networking (AON), where routers were supposed to get a lot smarter about prioritizing SAP traffic? The notion of attaining telco-like Five 9’s availability and service levels out of the basic plumbing of service, process, or (forbid the thought) application-level integration has long been a holy grail. Haven’t heard much from Cisco about AON lately.
The problem is mindset, not technology. Network admins are used to thinking at packet level; the software folks are used to thinking in terms of components, services, or application modules; while the business folks wonder why they can’t get their reports on time or why there’s so much latency when they attempt a supply chain optimization. The dilemma gets compounded when we start talking run time governance of SOA, a situation we were reminded of last week when Tibco announced addition of Service Level Performance Manager to their ActiveMatrix SOA management stack. Obviously, when gauging whether service contracts are fulfilled, you need the ability at the level of named service to see if it is available and whether latency is within what’s called for in the service contract. The problem is that, while software development factors like how a service is designed and whether the SOAP headers and XML schemas are properly formed will impact performance, at some point, when demand for a service spikes, you’ve got to start provisioning underlying infrastructure.
As we’ve written previously, there’s still a disconnect between SOA run time governance and underlying infrastructure management that for now is handled through email or SneakerNet. At the technology level, nobody is yet talking about how service level management issues identified by tools from folks like Tibco or AmberPoint are going to automatically generate trouble tickets in Remedy or Peregrine. At the mindset level, nobody is yet talking about mapping SOA run time governance to ITIL processes.
Until we do, the goal of conceiving service connectivity, performance, and SLA management will remain a tale of two IT silos.
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05.04.08
Posted in e-Commerce, Technology Market Trends at 10:18 pm by Tony Baer
For now Microhoo is history. With Steve Ballmer walking away this weekend from Yahoo’s $37/share demands, inboxes are bound to be overflowing Monday morning with al the postmortems.
We’ll keep ours short and sweet. It’s obvious why Microsoft ditched its otherwise successful M&A model to snag Yahoo: it’s in the unusual position of playing underdog, in this case, to Google’s online ad machine. It’s obvious why Yahoo turned down what is probably going to be the best offer it’s going to get: if it must surrender independence, it’d rather do so with Google in a way that keeps the rank and file, not to mention the antitrust folks happy.
One of the obvious arguments against the Microhoo deal is that Yahoo’s software platform is largely open source, while Microsoft’s obviously isn’t. But the open/closed source dichotomy shouldn’t be such a deal killer because Microsoft of late has shown welcome pragmatism toward open source, as evidenced by Sam Ramji’s keynote to EclipseCon a couple months back.
As we noted when the deal first surfaced, Microsoft faced a similar situation back roughly 15 years ago when the company was blindsided by rise of the Internet. At the time, Bill Gates called a management retreat and effectively steered a U-turn. This time around, Microsoft is punting rather than reaching back into its bench. Admittedly, life’s more complex today; when the modern web emerged, you had Netscape, which had market penetration but no business, whereas today with Google, Microsoft has met its match. Also, there’s the question of whether Ray Ozzie really has the moxie to fill Gates’ shoes.
There’s obviously no shortage of debate going round.
Veteran Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley couldn’t like the deal less. “Microsoft’s decision to walk restores my faith in the future of the company,” she wrote, adding that her view is evidently shared by at least some within Microsoft as well. The Gillmor Gang convened on Kentucky Derby Day and concluded that “Google is a big winner, Microsoft is not dead, and lives to bid another day.” Larry Dignan speculates that, besides Google, Facebook and MySpace (weren’t they the ones eclipsed by Facebook?) are also winners as, guess what, they’ve got the only other beachfront property left. Ovum’s David Mitchell counters that the deal would have helped Microsoft in Asia where it could have leveraged Yahoo’s penetration in China. My colleague Andrew Brust, who’s finally returned to blogging, offers a more idealistic view of why the deal should happen: it not only fills the online ad gap, but provides a great platform for monetizing its AQuantive ad server acquisition. “AQuantive’s ad serving platform and Razor Fish’s agency savvy could combine really well with the reach that Yahoo’s network of sites would provide. Add Silverlight to the equation, with its rich media capabilities, and things get really exciting…”
Our take? Yahoo will try sidling up to Google, but (1) if YaGoogle (or GoogleHoo?) can’t get past antitrust (remember, this is about ads) and (2) Microsoft still hasn’t spent its $44 billion, Ballmer will return with an offer that will sound a lot like $33, or even less.
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04.30.08
Posted in Java, Application Development, IT Infrastructure, .NET, SOA & Web Services, Data Management, Enterprise Integration, Rich Internet Apps., Web 2.0 Apps at 9:08 pm by Tony Baer
You can tell you’re at a techie conference when the CEO’s opening address steps you through the generations of IT history. Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadivé, who roughly a decade ago wrote a book on the power of real-time information, is now telling us that real-time isn’t fast enough; you need to be able to predict the foreseeable future based on patterns that are emerging today. What was kind of amusing was that as he was drawing Tibco’s vision of event-driven architecture (EDA), events took their own turn as his slide presentation anticipated what Ranadive was going to talk about next, and advanced from the EDA architectural diagram to the next shot before he was through. Check out Dana’s Gardner’s ZDNet blog for another account of Ranadive’s keynote.
TUCON 2008 provided some interesting tidbits of a company in transition. Like most major software players, it came off a good 2007 and, Q1 2008 wasn’t too shabby either (like the rest of the software industry, we’re waiting for Q3 and 4 to see if Tibco and its peers can handle the truth). Like most active mid-tier players, the company is embarking on a SOA transition that hasn’t always been well explained to its customers. In part it’s due to the fact that Tibco has had to layer over a legacy, the penalty paid for being the first on the block, but mostly it’s due to the fact that the company has not adequately communicated its message as to how all the pieces are fitting together. With Tibco ONE, which seeks to unify the design experience across all its tools, busses, and process engines, it’s made an auspicious start. But to date, the company lacks a page to explain what the ActveMatrix brand is, and the vision and message behind it. Enter “Tibco ActiveMatrix” in Google today, and aside from point product listings, you’ll get a SOA landing page with a list of ActiveMatrix products underneath it.
The highlights of Tibco’s announcements include a welcome addition to run time SOA governance, Service Performance Manager, which cleverly bundles some of its Business Events complex event processing technology to tell you whether you’re meeting the Service Level Agreements, at least from a performance standpoint. It takes the assumption that service levels are a classic complex event processing problem, especially given the kinds of highly scaled and highly distributed networks that Tibco customers tend to have. We attended a live podcast recording session led by Dana Gardner that featured independent analyst Joe McKendrick, IDC analyst Sandy Rogers, Tibco SOA marketing manager Rourke McNamara, and Allstate technology solutions VP Anthony Abbatista that plumbed the topic to more detail, which should be published soon by Gardner and Tibco.
What’s missing (and Tibco is hardly alone here) is the link with the actual systems performance side of the house. Ironically, an announcement made at the show that BMC will OEM ActiveMatrix as the SOA platform to integrate its Business Service Management (BSM) products was a bit anticlimactic, as it was not about adding any tie-ins between SOA service performance management and IT service management. The challenge is that, if service levels on a service are tanking, it would be nice to either automatically trigger a trouble ticket and/or initiate an action to trigger something like a hypervisor manager to automatically spawn some new VMware or similar containers.
The problem is that the issue has yet to be adequately defined, there are no standards for specifying how such an interprocess communication might be initiated, and finally, there’s the age-old problem of organizational silos: service level management of SOA is part of run time governance, which tends to be the domain of the software development organization. Meanwhile, IT service levels in the data center are the domains of service operators. Even were technologies and standards adopted, you’d have the challenge of marketing a joint solution to two different entry points in the IT organization, something that will only happen when a CIO bangs heads together.
A couple other interesting developments coming up in the pipe today included some early fruits of a budding technology partnership between Tibco and Microsoft that, actually, have little to do with each other. The first is the ability for Microsoft .NET development shops that have Tibco licenses to invoke Tibco’s EMS messaging technology from Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) in place of something like Microsoft’s own MSMQ – this was the result of joint customers like Allstate that said, we’ve got sizable .NET installed base, and we want our .NET apps to talk to Tibco’s busses without having to do lots of translation. From a more strategic point, the relationship makes sense because, aside from Eclipse-based tooling, Tibco is not your typical Java EE provider because it relies on busses, rather than servers. So there’s no reason why Tibco shouldn’t have closer ties to Microsoft.
The other Microsoft related development was a statement of direction that going forward, Tibco richer clients would use Microsoft Silverlight, rather than Adobe Flex. Now of course, the natural question to ask is, didn’t Tibco already have a rich web client strategy already with General Interface, and does this mean that GI will fall by the wayside (it’s based on Ajax)? The answer is yes and no – GI still lives, but according to technology VP Matt Quinn, when it comes to charting the extremely complex network topologies that ActiveMatrix must manage, JavaScript simply runs out of gas. Quinn added that in this case, the decision was strictly the result of a technology shootout, as opposed to something more strategic. In essence, Silverlight can talk back to any server, while Flex has more dependence on its own servers. Admittedly with Microsoft there’s always questions of cross platform support, but for now it promises support of all the usual browser suspects.
The final piece for today was Tibco doing something really weird – a software company going into the custom appliance business. It’s for a special use case: high-end financial services houses (maybe later telcos) who are so neck deep in algorithmic trading that they need to process such huge throughputs with practically no latency. They are packaging Rendezvous (the message bus on which the company was founded) in a box, with the idea being to provide supercharged throughput to financial service clients who are demanding it.
Although folks like Oracle gave the practice a bad name in the past (recall the “Raw Iron” 8i database appliance?), recently it’s not been so unusual for ISVs to embed their stuff in silicon. But typically it’s commodity silicon using commodity pieces of the Linux kernel. What makes this different is that Tibco is doing custom silicon -– think of their boxes as ASICS on steroids. In the short run, Tibco can count on an addressable market numbering in the hundreds. When it comes to silicon, that’s probably a few seconds of production, which means huge expense and high risk as the market is so modest. We understand the need from Tibco’s customer base, and of course the unusual nature of the problem, but we wonder in an age of commodity hardware, how a company not experienced with this side of the market is successfully going to navigate upwind.
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Posted in Technology Market Trends at 1:28 am by Tony Baer
Maybe we should have entitled this entry, “How to Kill a Conference.”
Let’s explain. For the past several years, one of the events that we’ve most looked forward to was Sand Hill Group’s annual Software conferences. Brought together by industry veteran M.R. Rangaswami, the conference was an intimate gathering of software industry business executives and financiers, providing place where one could truly put one’s ear to the ground and get a sense of where the money was flowing. In fact, even more valuable than the agenda (which boasted an A-list of speakers, ranging from Steve Ballmer to Mark Benioff and Hasso Plattner) were the networking opportunities.
We had the misfortune of attending this year’s gathering, which was hardly anything like its predecessors. Previously an intimate gathering of C level software executives, venture capitalists, and angel investors in Santa Clara, this year it was airlifted wholesale to Vegas and merged in with InterOp, a gathering of network gearheads. In place of an intimate event with maybe a couple thousand attendees, you had probably about 10x the crowds, most of whom were looking at converged routers.
Now of course, there’s obviously a case to be made from letting a tiny event take advantage of discounted room deals when piggybacked with a larger event. The problem is that, in their infinite wisdom, the InterOp folks ran both events as one conference –- which wouldn’t have been a bad idea if there was some commonality or intersecting of the audiences. But software executives and network geeks?
Of course, Sand Hill Group is a small, specialized group that helps emerging software vendors formulate go-to-market and business planning, it’s not a media, analyst, or conferences organization. So we fully understood their decision to sell the conference to Tech Web Networks. But as for Tech Web, just what were these people thinking? We presume they paid good money to take on the event, so we’re wondering if anybody there ever passed Demographics 101. They could have easily paired it with another of their events, Enterprise 2.0, where there might have been far more synergy. Unfortunately for us, the result was largely a wasted day getting lost in Vegas, not to mention all the needless pestering over routers and switches that clogged our voice and emails ahead of time.
They made their mistake, hopefully we won’t repeat ours.
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04.25.08
Posted in Application Development, SOA & Web Services, Technology Market Trends at 4:22 pm by Tony Baer
Over the past couple days, we’ve seen a backlash to a backlash. Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) has been seen as a reaction or backlash to the complexity of SOA. But as no good deed goes unpunished, there’s much concern that with debates over WOA vs. SOA, the ideal of service-orientation gets lost in the message. Weeks of give and take over the matter culminated in the welcome return of Dana Gardner’s much-missed BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights podcasts. Yesterday, we joined with Forrester Research analyst Jim Kobielus, independent analyst Joe McKendrick, Current Analysis principal analyst Brad Shimmin, and Procullux Ventures director Phil Wainewright. There seemed to be emerging consensus that WOA complements or can also provide a simpler onramp to SOA.
But after we received a reader comment that maybe we’re muddying the waters with the plea, “Can we please stop the proliferation of WOA when folks can barely still digest SOA??,” the result sparked yet a new round of debate not only from yesterday’s crew, but also consultant (and WOA evangelist) Dion Hinchecliffe, Jon Collins, plus Neil Macehiter and Neil Ward-Dutton.
Here’s a few excerpts:
“Not sure how things work in the US, but in Europe folks need time to digest stuff and make it relevant to themselves. That’s still happening in the real world around SOA, at least over here. All the chatter about WOA appears pretty pie-in-the-sky and hype-driven, too vendor- and tech-focused for the folks we speak to… the “pie-in-the-sky” etc stuff isn’t necessarily my perspective, but it certainly is the perspective of the people I speak to here in Europe. So we have to moderate our message and show how new ideas fit in with existing ideas…”
“I also agree with Dana’s blog about dropping the acronyms altogether…”
“The problem is that Gartner’s business is predicated on creating acronyms (that’s where WOA came from after all) and they are, as [we] were discussing earlier in the week, a market maker. Is there a WOA MQ? My guess (0.9 probability) is that if there isn’t there will be soon…”
“Too bad human nature will never allow it. If we see or understand something that’s unique, we are compelled to name it…”
“Don’t under estimate the Silicon Valley get-rich quick thinking and seduction process. There’s a deep dichotomy: Silicon Valley methods vs ITIL reasoning…”
“WOA simply reflects the set of emergent network and application architectures that are working today on a large scale on the Web, getting results for a great many organizations by using slightly different techniques and a fairly different mindset than we’ve used in SOA…”
“I sit in trepidation waiting for the first press release I get with the acronym “WOA” in the title, knowing it will be from some obscure company that has somehow managed to fit their quart into the latest pint pot…”
“I don’t believe SOA is going away or out of fashion, I’ve predicted a potentially bright future for it as WOA ideas helps deliver on the fuller promise of SOA…”
“SOA isn’t just seen as a technical integration-centric activity, but also a business architecture / business transformation…”
“I for one am not seeing much of that kind of strategic-level analysis and thinking in the WOA-side of things… as you say, that’s a pretty far cry from using SOA as a way to enable the transformation and reinvention of business processes and business models. And that’s an enterprise perspective that probably needs to be “married” to WOA and its pointedly consumption-oriented approach since it could be a great enabler of such activities. It does remain to seen if it’s a meaningful driver of them however…”
To hear the podcast that prompted today’s discourse, click here.
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04.24.08
Posted in Open Source, OS/Platforms, Database, Enterprise Applications, SaaS (Software as a Service), Technology Market Trends, Outsourcing at 10:02 pm by Tony Baer
On the eve of last year’s Software conference, Sand Hill Group principal M.R. Rangaswami spoke on the prospects for innovation in a consolidating software industry. Evidently there was some room left for innovation, witness Sun’s billion dollar acquisition of MySQL. According to Rangaswami, it points to the fact that there’s life – and value – in open source software companies beyond Red Hat.
In fact, 2007 was a year of second acts, with Salesforce joining the ranks of billion-dollar software companies. On the eve of Software 2008 next week, we just had a return engagement with MR to get his take on what’s gone down over the past year. The first point he dropped was breaking conventional wisdom that another software company could actually crack the established order, given ongoing consolidation. “People questioned whether there would ever be another billion dollars software company again, although of course Mark Benioff doesn’t call it that,” he noted.
But Rangaswami added that conventional wisdom wasn’t totally off, referring to the fact that a lot of promising break-outs are being gobbled up before they get the chance to go public – MySQL being Exhibit A. There’s plenty of cash around the old guard to snap up promising upstarts.
Nonetheless, there are invisible limits to the acquisition trend, most notably among SaaS (Software as a Service) providers. He ascribes the reticence to the fact that conventional software firms are scared of the disruptive effects that on demand providers could have in cannibalizing their existing businesses.
Going forward, Rangaswami expects some retrenchment. We’d put it another way – with last year’s 5 – 6% growth in IT spending, it was almost impossible for any viable ISV to not make money. Even if, perish the thought, we had been CFO for some poor ISV last year, it would have been in the black in spite of us.
But this year, with IT spending growth anticipated in the more modest 1 – 2% range if that, there’s going to be a lot of missed numbers. IBM cleaned up in Q1, but Oracle’s and Microsoft’s numbers failed to impress (Microsoft last year was coasting on Vista upgrades). Rangaswami advises ISVs to keep the lid of development costs (he expects to see more offshoring this year), but he also says that ISVs should be “smarter” with their marketing budgets. “Do a lot more with programs that are online and use Web 2.0 technologies as opposed to some of more traditional approaches,” he advised, pointing to channels like podcasts and YouTube. “Most people watch TV on YouTube these days,” he said, just slightly exaggerating.
Of course, Rangaswami says you can’t ignore emergence of social computing, for which Facebook for now has become the poster child. We admit to being a bit put off by the superficial atmosphere of the place, and of course not being under 35, why should we care what somebody did last night or who their favorite band is? But it’s become conventional wisdom that some form of social networking is bound to emerge for more professional purposes, like engaging your customers, that goes beyond the forums and chat rooms of user groups, the occasional regional or annual conferences, or the resume-oriented purpose of LinkedIn. In fact, one recent startup, Ringside Networks, is offering a “social appserver” where businesses can use Facebook apps to build their own communities on their own sites.
But Rangaswami says, why not use some of the less serious aspects of social computing to conduct real business. Like getting your New England customers together at the next Red Sox game (just make sure that one of your New York customers by mistake doesn’t slip onto the invite list).
The theme of this year’s Software 2008 conference is what Rangaswami terms “Platform Shift.” After the upheavals of the open systems and Internet eras, it appeared that the software industry was coalescing around Java and .NET platforms. But then on demand began making the Java vs. .NET differences irrelevant. For instance, if you want to write to Salesforce’s platform, it’s in a stored procedures languages that is like, but isn’t Java. On the horizon you have Amazon’s EC2 cloud, the Google Apps platform, and you could probably also consider Facebook to be another platform ecosystem (there are thousands of apps already written to it).
The good news is that tough times actually encourage customers to buy a couple of on demand seats for petty cash because it sharply limits risk.
The result is that barriers to entry for new software solution providers are lower than ever. You don’t have to ask customers to install software and you don’t have to build the on demand infrastructure to host it. Just build the software, then choose whose cloud you want to host it on, pay only by the drink, and start marketing. According to Rangaswami, the cloud might remove the hurdles to getting started, but getting your brand to emerge from the fog may prove the toughest challenge. “Sales and marketing in this new world will be totally different.”
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Posted in Application Development, .NET, SOA & Web Services, Data Management, Desktop Apps, Rich Internet Apps., Web 2.0 Apps at 12:40 am by Tony Baer
The concept, or some might say “markitecture” of Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) is hardly new, but for some reason, in the past few weeks, debates over WOA vs. SOA have suddenly flared up like a tornado materializing in Kansas. Probably it’s no coincidence that the catharsis was the observation by Burton Group analyst Anne Thomas Manes that “SOA is not working in most organizations” because of a lack of will to share services across organizational silos. Microsoft’s new Live Mesh raises the profile of WOA even further -– more about that in a moment.
What’s interesting is that Manes’ conclusions laid the problem more to culture than technology complexity. But subsequent arguments from the likes of Dana Gardner, who contends that SOA became all too much the end and not the means; or Software AG’s Miko Matsumura and StrikeIron’s David Linthicum who viewed WOA as an onramp to SOA, while TechTarget’s SearchSOA columnist Michael Meehan concluded from interviewing a number of experts that WOA was simply hype and markitecture, or, “an empty suit if you will.”
For the record, we’re struck by the incredible parallels between WOA and Ajax, in that they both stretch common web building blocks in ways that creators never foresaw. Both have similar appeal to web developers, based on the facts that the technologies are already familiar, both rely on a grab bag of poorly structured technologies, with few if any rules governing how you apply them.
Cut to the chase. Like the Democratic primaries, the latest reminder that we just can’t put this WOA vs. SOA debate to rest is Microsoft’s unveiling of Live Mesh. The elevator pitch is that it is Microsoft’s emerging on demand environment enabling you to store and share things between PCs and other kinds of devices like phones (smart and dumb), game stations, PDAs, and other things. We won’t repeat what’s already been reported, but check out Mary Jo Foley who’s got the Top Ten list describing what Live Mesh is, and eWeek’s Daryl Taft, who’s described in detail the underlying development platform.
Live Mesh uses a freebie new technology from Microsoft called FeedSync that makes syndication feeds bi-directional. It surrounds FeedSync with – you guessed it – a webby-oriented development environment. “If you want to live in software and services world, you must start with what works on the web, lowest programming model to be built on open protocols,” explained Abhay Parasnis, Microsoft’s product unit manager for Live Mesh.
So let’s call WOA the lowest common denominator.
Under the hood, Live Mesh’s plumbing runs on raw XML sent over HTTP, using a RESTful programming model for obtaining services, plus the familiar ATOM or RSS feeds that support pubsub communications. Above that, Microsoft provides different paths so .NET, Ajax, and dynamic scripting languages can all write to this platform. This being Microsoft, rendering via WPF and Silverlight are supported as well. OK, if you want Java, AIR, or Flex, better wait for another Mono project.
Live Mesh is intended as a loosely coupled platform in that it supports familiar store & forward and pubsub modes. You might call it a variation of a Services-Oriented Architecture because the services are supposed to be abstracted from whatever device or software platform they are implemented on, but there’s no trace of any web services stack here.
In other words, if you want to write once, run anywhere, Microsoft is telling you to use WOA.
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04.23.08
Posted in Uncategorized, Application Development, Database, SOA & Web Services, Enterprise Applications, SaaS (Software as a Service), Data Management, Enterprise Integration at 12:59 am by Tony Baer
Last week, we opened the Pandora’s Box about the inevitability of the cloud. And we spoke of the tension between SOA and WOA camps as to which is the best means for getting services from or providing services to the cloud.
You can bet with the Web 2.0 Expo this week that there is plenty of noise about the cloud. For some, it’s so much noise that the whole notion of cloud computing, or the cloud itself, has become rather foggy.
One of the arguments over SOA is that the web services standards that are used for implementation have generated intimidating layers of complexity, and that web-oriented alternatives (e.g., WOA) are far more straightforward and far better fits for the web development skills that are already commonplace.
So there will be a flurry of announcements. A few examples: Kapow Technologies for instance, is launching an on demand mashup server, providing black box capabilities like Excel plug-ins for data services out in the cloud. Meanwhile Serena is teaming with Cap Gemini to launch a sandbox enabling business professionals to design and compose a mashup without the need for programming skills.
One of the more interesting announcements from a lineage standpoint is the emergence from its cocoon of SnapLogic, a startup with a WOA-oriented takeoff on RSS that it promotes as “Really Simple Integration.” Started by Informatica founder Gaurav Dhillon, SnapLogic represents a closing of the circle for simplified data access. Just as Informatica was the first to adopt a visual, component-based approach to developing database integrations, SnapLogic is doing same with resources that are accessible over the web.
It’s based on an HTTP server that supports RESTful services; a repository comprised of metadata written in HTML; generic resources for reading, transforming, and writing data; and support of Java and various dynamic scripting languages on the server, and multiple web output formats including HTML pages, RSS or ATOM feeds, and JSON (a JavaScript-based data interchange format).
Using RESTful style, each data source is treated as a resource. In turn, access to those resources can be managed, not through adding tokens or other entitlement technologies, but by making each individual or class of individual’s access a separate URI. Imagine, if you will, table, where the columns are data sources and the rows are specific users. Such tables could be fed by directories and internal access control tools, or the HTML metadata repository, rather than adding a separate layer of complexity for access and authentication.
Providing a clever way for RESTful services to become reusable, SnapLogic helps flesh out the vision of WOA, which is could be nicknamed, technology that is just good enough to get the data you need, wherever it sits out in the cloud. Don’t mistake the elegance of simplicity; although web-oriented approaches essentially take the user friendliness of client/server database apps to the web, the simplicity of the architecture rules out embedding properties or sophisticated capabilities such as federated identity, orchestration, security assertions that come with WS-standards. That’s not necessarily a bad thing if your app doesn’t necessarily involve processes involving high sensitive data or require high performance. But if they do, there’s no reason why they can’t be implemented within secured environments where all the necessary governance and performance are applied extrinsically.
But what’s interesting is that with emergence of the cloud, SnapLogic and StrikeIron offer approachable alternatives that let you have your data services without the reengineering baggage.
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