Mike Wagner - Perpetual beta

ZDNet June 28, 06 The Senate Commerce Committee, splitting 11 to 11 and therefore rejecting compromise language , set the stage for a carrier-controlled Internet. If the bill passes the Senate and is signed by the President, you can kiss the Net you know "goodbye." Farewell, open networks and open standards. Soon every packet will be subject to inspection and surcharges based on what it carries and who sent it or where it is going. The compromise language would have guaranteed that all traffic sent Farewell, open networks and open standards. Soon every packet will be subject to inspection and surcharges. over carrier backbones would be treated equally, regardless of its source or destination. Carriers will be free to target especially profitable traffic for surcharges. In the Republicans' version of the bill, which will likely be passed, there is a "consumers' bill of rights" ( click for the draft legislation ) within a new universal service regime based o...

I've written a lot lately about the big picture Web 2.0 and the freeing up of the content within businesses through SOA. Now AJAX is a technology that has helped energized the interest from a technology standpoint within the last year for it is the consuming side of the s ervices that are freed up through SOA from the silos and shouldn't be pushed aside with all the Web 2.0 hype. Dan Malks (Photo of Dan Malks. You think he always wears a nametag or is it a reference to "tagging?") of JackBe , is a former Principal Engineer at Sun Microsystems where he was a leader in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) gives one of the best explainations of CLient/SOA and Server-side proxy. Definately worth a read. What I see? What is my take? Everybody on the server side is focused on freeing up the functionality out of these monolithic applications so you can ge...

From TheOnion MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index. "Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. "Soon, it will be." The new project, dubbed Google Purge, will join such popular services as Google Images, Google News, and Google Maps, which catalogs the entire surface of the Earth using high-resolution satellites. As a part of Purge's first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google. "A year ago, Google offered to scan every book on the planet for its Google Print project. Now, they are promising to burn the rest," John Batte...

The Onion

Sun Microsystems announced their support for the DojoToolkit and the Foundation on June 16th. The PR-flack-processed version is available , but the short story is basically that some of the great engineers at Sun that we’ve had the chance to meet over the last couple of months will have a chance to spend more time hacking on Dojo, and as part of their day jobs to boot. As part of the Dojo Toolkit project, Sun will be contributing AJAX widgets, helping with internationalization efforts and refining documentation. Greg Murray, Sun's AJAX Architect, will be one of the people representing Sun as a member of the Dojo Foundation.

For those who don't know already or still debate about the capitalization of AJAX......... "AJAX is all-caps because it's an acronym, A synchronous J avascript A nd X ML." ZDNet, January 10, 2006.

http://sys-con.tv/read/239153.htm Live from JavaOne 2006 in San Francisco By: SYS-CON TV Jun. 21, 2006 12:00 PM I liked the fact that Danny Malks mentioned how JackBe is moving towards "lightweight" platform solutions direction with r egards to the convergance of SOA and the client while utilalyzing AJAX technologies. Sounds like a software model that could help other independent software vendors (ISVs), service providers and enterprises deploy their services exposed by their SOA as software as a service (SaaS). In addition, to not only creating meaningfull mashups, but provide a lightweight admin platform to regulate those atomic messages. Interesting listen from the former Sun team who brought us the J2EE bible. Only thing I noticed is that I had to quickly turn down my volume when John Crupi spoke a couple of times. He's so loud. I wonder if he's always so loud? Web 2.0, Mashup, Enterprise 2.0, AJAX, SOA, Composite Applications, Platform, Framework, l...

Jason Kolb I really like how Jason articulates his thoughts on the whole web 2.0 hoopla, so there is never any need to mess with his text. There still seems to be a lot of debate about using Web 2.0 technology in the Enterprise as part of the whole "53,651 bubble" discussion about whether this technology is viable outside of early adopters. This is odd to me, because in my previous life as Director of IT for a customer service company I would have been a rabid supporter of these ideas. In fact, I would have been drilling these concepts into my development group's collective heads and making sure they knew how to use the technology. Since I now build the software for the enterprise instead of use it (except for dogfooding, of course), I thought it might be interesting to put together a list of the reasons why I would have used it. The internal memo I would have sent, I suppose, on why it's a good idea for enterprises to start using these technolog...

With all the talk (myself included) about SOA, Web 2.0, Mashups, I’m finding myself struggling to accept the correct paradigm. As Jason Kolb says, SOA is a way of building applications so that they are capable of sharing data. REST and SOAP are both protocols for using the services it contains. Web Services are just an implementation, or wrapper, of those services. Web 2.0 allows other people or systems to interact with the SOA one builds. Web 2.0 is the idea of opening systems and allowing others to use them. Google opened its system, all kinds of Google Maps mashups resulted. Flickr opened their system, and mashups resulted. Amazon opened its system, and mashups resulted. "Mashup", is exactly what it implies--it mashes together two different systems and creates a brand new application using the two (or three, or four). Web 2.0 for the enterprise is allowing people to use more than one Web app and/or internal system at the same time. Web 2.0 for the enterprise wi...

http://www.physorg.com/news69600460.html By this time next year, Web sites not developed using the Ajax technique "will simply not be cool enough to use," an Internet analyst said Tuesday. " (Ajax is) the latest fashion in Web design," said David Mitchell Smith, vice president of research firm Gartner, at Gartner's annual regional conference in Tel Aviv. The good news for businesses that want to employ Ajax: "It's no longer just for rocket scientists. A few years ago you needed to invest a lot of money" to create Ajax Web sites, Smith said, "but now there are toolkits available." That makes it the "easiest and quickest attention-getting visual" for a Web site, Smith concluded. The research firm, noted for its predictions on technology and business, summed up by positing that there is an 80 percent chance that "By 2008, Ajax-style (sites) will be the dominant style for Rich Internet Application interfaces." But par...

Today, we’re still in an early phase for Web Services and SOAs. The traditional mindset that needs changing is the view that Web Services are an extension of the component object model. To many developers, Web Services are simply “another interface to a compiled object.” Instead, enterprises should approach SOA as fundamentally a process-driven architecture that leverages distributed processes in addition to distributed Services. Distributed processes are all about the creation of business processes that in turn depend on other business processes that may be defined anywhere in the organization. Such distributed, SO processes are the key to composite applications that run on an SOA. Approaching SOAs and Web Services from this perspective simplifies and clarifies many of the troublesome issues relating to distributed computing and Web Services. Today, integration goes from being a troublesome chore that must be accomplished through implementing increasing layers of complicated and expe...

It’s important to understand the connection between user interfaces and process-based composite applications in the context of SOA. The business process world makes a distinction between process and workflow, where process is automatic, while workflow involves people at certain points. In reality, however, there’s no such thing as a business process that doesn’t involve people. In fact, the illusion that business processes can be entirely automated is contrary to the agile nature of SO computing. The fact of the matter is that IT exists to meet human needs, and thus people are an integral part of the processes that IT enables. In other words, the human interface to composite applications is not an afterthought, but rather a key feature of the architecture. Furthermore, people do not work in isolation. Business relies upon teamwork, and teamwork requires collaboration. Client interfaces to composite applications must therefore be inherently collaborative. The business benefits to taking...

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a solution must take into account the initialand ongoing costs of the solution, relative to the solution it replaces. Composite applications based upon SOAs can lower TCO in several ways, including: Managing the Services in an SOA is less expensive and complex than managing the interfaces in a traditional integration solution. By leveraging the Web Services standards, composite applications lower the cost of proprietary technologies. Standards both level the competitive playing field for vendors, lowering prices generally, and also simplify the task of integration, lowering costs directly. Business analysts and technical business users are able to compose applications without the involvement of more expensive IT personnel. The more complex a business change is, the more effective SOA-based complications are at reducing the TCO of the solution, because of their inherently flexible nature. Fundamentally, SOAs provide business an “ag...

Everybody seems to be focused on the “social networking” aspect of Web 2.0 which is fine with regards to the general public and smoother collaboration with in organizations. But there is a collection of attributes that have a technology dimension aspects that will ultimately convert the Web 2.0 benefits into real business value drivers for the enterprises plus enable the capability of the social aspects. Technology-related attributes: These include technologies commonly associated with Web 2.0, such as Ajax , RSS, REST, microformats and public APIs. Non-technology attributes: These include data-related concepts, such as user-contributed content and user-generated metadata, as well as those relating to the process and the business model: greater openness, transparency and decentralized user participation. Web 2.0 has the potential to deliver business value, improve competitive position, help tap new markets, and optimize business processes. Co...

I've talked before about my take on Web 2.0 and how it is more than just all the hype about collaboration and/or the Social web. The true power of what the world is about to witness lies in the integration and composition of web services exposed through a service orientated architecture (SOA) to go beyond simple TCO issues, but rather to open an organization to new markets and opportunities that would have never have been possible without. See my short post on IaaS as I like to call it. Enterprise 2.0 to me is about the ability to push control of the systems out to the client. These new enterprise applications add their value at the client tier and AJAX does this by being an enabling technology. The big picture is Web 2.0: We are seeing the freeing up of the content within businesses (SOA) like we have seen the freeing up of content on the web in general. Currently, for those who haven't embraced SOA, information is locked in the enterprise and cant always share it. ...

Businesses, across all sectors and geographies, are under significant pressure to more closely align IT systems with business processes to improve business agility. This is driven by business imperatives to increase operational efficiency, to react more quickly to the needs of customers, partners and suppliers and maintain competitive advantage. To become more agile, enterprises are moving towards a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to build, maintain and integrate business applications and better leverage IT systems and infrastructure. One of the highest priorities for CIO’s is the ongoing need to simplify business integration while reducing development and maintenance time and costs. And with the advent of SOA, the challenges of integration are even more complex and the limitations of traditional application development and integration solutions are even more problematic. The agile enterprise must react more quickly to business change with IT solutions that are better, faster and c...

By: Mohit Chawla; Manivannan Gopalan Jun. 9, 2006 01:15 PM Sys-Con Brazil AJAX has given a new lease on life to the presentation layer just as Web services have given a new lease on life to the application layer. AJAX is a UI model. It's important in the sense that it allows people to use their browsers to directly interact with Web services; it's the best way for people to get at Web services and SOA assets. Currently, Web services perform well on a machine-to-machine level, but there have been problems building usable interfaces to interact with services. AJAX will be the answer to that problem. AJAX communicates through XMLHttpRequest. XMLHttpRequest helps communications between HTTP servers through XML. From the client side of the application, instantiate XMLHttpRequest and, through its methods, issue an HTTP command such as GET or PUT to the Web server. Through the XMLHttpRequest object you can now easily implement a Web service. Client code invokes them via HTTP, where th...

May 10, 2006 | Issue 42•19 BATON ROUGE, LA—In a breakthrough study that contradicts decades of understanding about the nature of alligator–drunkard relations, Louisiana State University researchers have concluded that people's drunkenness does not impair the ancient reptiles' ability to inflict enormous physical harm. "Our data strongly indicates that human intoxication does not transform an alligator into a docile creature that enjoys wrestling," said professor Ryder McCrory, chair of the Wildlife Taunting Department of LSU's prestigious Center For Bullying And Hazing Studies. "Despite its slow-witted demeanor and tendency to bask motionlessly in the hot sun, it's a mistake to believe that an alligator will passively tolerate a half nelson, no matter how much Southern Comfort is fueling it." McCrory said the study yielded statistics that speak for themselves. "In 10 out of 10 documented cases of violent alligator–drunkard encounters, the reptil...

Sandy Kemsley ranted about the results of a CIO Insight survey last month that had a significantly large number of polled CIOs and senior IT execs claiming that various bread-and-butter Web 2.0 technologies and collaboration apps such as AJAX, Wikis, Social Networking (tagging, etc.), RSS, etc. were of 'no interest" or "not on the radar screen." She briefly highlights a few on her post, and if one looks at the whole thing in aggregate, the no interest/not on the radar numbers are appalling and should give the Web 2.0 pundits some pause about the speed in which organizations are 'racing' to Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 or whatever we want to call it this week. SOA and SaaS fare a bit better percentage-wise...like a third of the polled don't have it in sight. And before anyone wants to take potshots at CIO Insight, this is one industry magazine that does a really nice job presenting reality in IT and their surveys are well done, so I am swayed by their numbers...

As business applications evolve, an increasing number of businesses are embracing using applications they don’t control or host – applications they leverage through the platform of the Internet – and that they purchase on-demand and as a service. Companies must become more agile and work together to remove costs from the value chain to reduce friction. This will improve the overall efficiency the overall value chain that can either increase margins or reduce prices to the consumer. This is a growth strategy rather than a cost reduction strategy. To be able to not just expose services through SOA, but to be able to reach-out to previously untapped markets by integrating or consuming these services through a agnostic platform. The value chain is composed of heterogeneous systems that need to be integrated. This is where Integrator solution providers come in. On-demand IT service-oriented architecture (SOA) where IT system and application processing is defined and developed as a set of ...

by Joe McKendrick ZDNet The main value of SOA is reuse. Build once, use often. So it can be assumed that any services you build and deploy should be reusable across the enterprise, or whatever other sphere you work in — or else you're not getting your money's worth, right? Well, it depends, advises ZapThink's Jason Bloomberg. Depends on what? SOA is all about reuse, right? Or you may as well just run a proprietary application for the same amount of expense. The answer depends on whether your SOA is being built in a top-down or bottom-up fashion, Bloomberg says. If your SOA effort is a top-down approach, reuse may not always be the number one priority. If your SOA is developing from the bottom up, reuse may add some value to the top 20% of applications getting the most usage. In the top-down approach to SOA, business processes are decomposed with an eye toward identifying areas of redundancy. However, Bloomberg says there are more pressing priorities in a top-down scenario, ...

IBM's SOA Foundation is said to be an, "integrated, open-standards-based set of software, best practices and patterns for Service Oriented Architecture." Yet products in the Foundation come from its Rational, WebSphere, Lotus and Tivoli software groups, and competitors like to argue that while IBM indubitably has breadth in SOA, it lacks an integrated suite of products. Advertisement While Carter argued that integration between the products in the SOA Foundation is, "already as tight as any of our competitors", she conceded: "Is everything in the SOA Foundation integrated? Everything is not." "Do we have some gaps?" Carter continued. "Yep, but we know what they are and we are working on them." Asked whether IBM will come out with a SOA suite, she said: "You will see us more tightly integrate the SOA Foundation, and maybe more." Indeed one of the reasons that Carter's role as IBM's SOA head was created in September ...

It seems that the benevolent J2EE/SOA former SUN team (Deepak Alur, Danny Malks, John Crupi) have started blogging with their new employer JackBe. For those who don't know they are all co-authors of the popular Core J2EE Patterns book and now are lead developers/Visionaries at the AJAX solution company JackBe. The JackBe blog site with links to all of their individual site can be found here. Definitely worth bookmarking to keep abreast of what's happening in the AJAX/SOA convergence space. http://www.jackbe.com/blogs/

by Dion Hinchcliffe Sunday, 4 June 2006 http://web2.wsj2.com/ I’m [Dion Hinchcliffe] in New York City getting ready for the Real-World Ajax seminar tomorrow morning for a talk I'll be giving on Ajax design elements. I've been thinking a lot lately about the various approaches to developing Ajax software and trying to construct an intellectual framework for evaluating them. Clearly, a large amount of online software in the future, both SaaS and Web 2.0 (and yes, there's a difference) will be developed using Ajax. And figuring out which direction to take for now is actually getting harder right now, not easier. That's because options for creating Ajax software are still growing rapidly and run the gamut from incredibly powerful platforms such as Microsoft's Atlas, to declarative specification appraoches such as those used by Backbase and Laszlo. On the micro-Ajax side , there's the lightweight, mostly blendable frameworks and widget bundles such as Dojo and Sc...

KNOXVILLE, TN—A 1995 e-mail extracted from the hard drive of a recently unearthed Compaq desktop PC offers a tantalizing glimpse into the day-to-day life of a primitive Internet society, said the archaeologists responsible for its discovery. "We're very excited by this find, because only by understanding our e-mail past can we hope to understand our e-mail present and future," said Northwestern University archaeology professor Lane Caspari, who has been leading the dig through the equipment storage area of a Knoxville-area credit union since late April, on Tuesday. "The discovery also sheds new light on the 1990s—an era we know very little about." Written by a "scully666@compuserve.com" and addressed to a "makincopeez@prodigy.net," the writer expresses the ancient equivalent of boredom, asks the receiver about his or her status in their primeval office environment, then refers to the act of sending the e-mail itself. "Nothing going on,...

What the #$@%? What are all these other AJAX vendors doing? And where am I? This isn't Sun. (Note: Not a quote from John Crupi) (This is) "While big strides have been made in Web-based applications, we envision a future that promises far bigger and better things for organizations that invest in AJAX and SOA technologies," said JackBe CTO John Crupi. "JackBe's comprehensive product set, methodology and approach, plus our successes working with many large organizations, position the company as a significant player in this market."

"With the resurgence of SaaS or at least the next stage in evolution of it, some are confused about the direction and or the definition of said stage. Some call it next-gen platform, SaaS 2.0, On-Demand, Integration as a Service (IaaS) . The market will decide upon a name. But what will this name represent? Just as SaaS used to be called ASP, I think IaaS or SaaS 2.0 could be best explained by revisiting what composite applications are all about. That is really what everyone is talking about. The integration of atomic web services through a (hopefully agnostic) platform that doesn't sit on the server or client, but is not middleware. This is the future of Enterprise applications or Enterprise 2.0. This is the driving power of the concept of web 2.0. Finally utilyzing the services that can be exposed through SOA." Mike Wagner "Composite applications" may be a new term for some, although the concept was first named by Gartner in December 1997. Old idea or...

By: Roger Strukhoff Jun. 2, 2006 07:00 AM http://in.sys-con.com/read/230274.htm It has now been very well-documented, by SYS-CON and by others, that Ajax was the big story at the recent JavaOne 2006 Conference in San Francisco. But during that same week, a continent away in Orlando, Ajax was seemingly nowhere to be found at SAP's Sapphire '06 event. A look at dozens of Sapphire-related announcements, from SAP and several of its technology partners, finds nary a mention of Ajax. Although SAP exec Shai Agassi (pictured) told an Australian IT publication recently that "we've opened up our enterprise services repository so that users can program in any language -- Python, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, etc. We're not going to get into religious battles," it seems certain that members of the SAP customer base are not likely to be early adopters of Ajax when it comes to messing with their websites. One industry CEO whose company does a lot of work with SAP told me that he thi...

http://ajaxdevelopersjournal.com/read/228752.htm By: AJAXWorld News Desk May. 31, 2006 07:30 AM JackBe CTO John Crupi will be presenting a session on Enterprise Ajax, entitled "Focusing on the A(rchitecture) in Ajax," at the Real-World Ajax Seminar in New York June 5-6. Crupi has extensive J2EE experience, which brings a historical perspective to the current Ajax boom. During an exclusive podcast interview with SYS-CON (the file for which is attached), Crupi said that his presentation will focus on the deeper aspects of Ajax development, moving beyond just widgets for widgets sake. The Ajax bandwagon is clearly full, Crupi acknowledges, and he wants to be sure that enterprise IT developers who are considering Ajax, or who are already working with it, take a disciplined approach that brings out its true benefits to the organization. Crupi also mentioned JackBe's presence in the Open Ajax Alliance, drew parallels to the current growth in Ajax with a previous mania for J2EE,...

I've been advocating (& evangelizing) the SaaS alternatives to ASP-hosting models for the last few years, and firmly believe that it will be the proper accounting treatment of SaaS-architected client-server solutions on a capital-spending track (not consumed via browser, and therefore expensed) that will see the SaaS model truly explode. SaaS solutions that adhere to a customer-premise deployment & managed services subscription harness (ideally suited for .net), will rule the day & offer an improved TCO (Windows-Application Server Appliances are rapidly gaining ground) as an added discipline. It is already well understood by Enterprise Software experts, that software that profitably impacts customer workflows & business processes, needs to be customer-premised -- and alliances like the GXS/MSFT B2B grid solution are proving this point (thanks Eddie!)... In pursuit of my above manifesto, I was fortunate to come across Bill McNee's similiar thoughts (and far more...

1. Multi-Tenant, Shared Systems – Using a single instance of an application to serve customers. 2. Trusted Reliability and Performance – Must have 99.9% and sub 300 Milliseconds per transaction. Has to be a transparent service 3. Democratization of Enterprise Applications –needs to serve 1 – 10,000 users all in the same fashion 4. Metadata-Driven Customization – The ability for SaaS users to define and customize the application – Language, business terms etc. 5. Mash-Ups –Leveraging the community and other services seamlessly into the application. 6. Web Services-base Integration – The web service API must be standard based to achieve the snap on functionality and collaboration demanded 7. Development as a Service –Example: Informatica’s PowerCenter Connect a family of data access options that provide broad, metadata-driven, high-performance data interchange for enterprise data integration initiatives. PowerCenter Connect includes options for accessing ERP and CRM systems, message-bas...