Mike Wagner - Perpetual beta

Hard-nosed executives recognize that there are costs associated with any benefit. To convince today's upper-level decision makers to approve strategic investments, they need to hear more than phrases like "essential to the business," "the results are too unpredictable," and "yields intangible benefits." In the world of Web development, the move from HTML to AJAX-powered HTML can often be achieved at a relatively low cost, but there are both direct and indirect costs associated with AJAX that must be taken into account. A close analysis of these factors will enable business managers to make more well informed decisions when considering AJAX adoption in a particular application and across their organization. Let's look first at the expected benefits from AJAX. AJAX is all about ways to create a more interactive and productive connection between a user and a Web-based application. Because AJAX provides similar advanced user interface features to those...

Ajax emerging as RIA alternative of choice, says Burton By Rich Seeley, News Writer 10 Jan 2007 | SearchWebServices.com Ajax is positioned to become "a mainstream tool used by Web developers as an alternative to other rich Internet application (RIA) technologies," writes Richard Monson-Haefel, senior analyst with the Burton Group Inc. in a report released today. In my opinion, these JSF-based approaches will remain niche players. Jason Bloomberg Senior Analyst, ZapThink LLC. Organizations considering RIA options are advised in the report to begin working with Ajax as opposed to the competing technologies including Adobe Flash, Java applets, Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E), Mozilla's XML User Interface Language (XUL) and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). However, Monson-Haefel does predict that Flash will be the choice for applications that require sophisticated animation as he finds it unlikely that Ajax will evolve to provide those c...

Tuesday, 09 January 2007 By Robin Bloor, Partner Portals first emerged when the browser captured the hearts, minds and imagination of the software industry. With the advent of the browser, the windowed desktop was suddenly passé and the assumption was that the browser itself could become a kind of desktop. It wasn’t websites like Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos and AOL were also dubbed portals because they provided a similar kind of entry point to surfing the web. Early portals evolved into the idea of an “Enterprise Portal” - portal software that provided a coherent access to all relevant enterprise applications, as well as to information available in the enterprise and to relevant external information services. Business users could arrange ‘portlets’ by choosing elements from a common set of interfaces to back office systems. Access to intranets, extranets and useful Internet resources could also be available. The business user could simply “pick and mix’, with a little help from IT. It Was N...

Document ID: ZAPFLASH-200713 | Document Type: ZapFlash By Ronald Schmelzer Posted: Jan. 03, 2007 For those in the United States, 2007 has started out with a bang – two major snow storms in the Rocky Mountains and a persistent warm front that’s keeping the entire East Coast in unusually warm weather for this time of year. Even more so, it’s football season in the US and both the New England Patriots and Baltimore Ravens are in the playoffs – the two teams representing ZapThink’s two office locations. Of course, speaking metaphorically, with regards to SOA, 2006 ended with a bang and 2007 is already showing considerable warmth and competitive vigor. ZapThink has seen SOA take off even more aggressively than we anticipated at the beginning of 2006, and all indications show that SOA strength will be further reinforced and expanded in 2007 to many corners of the IT environment, throughout the world and in many different industries. And so, during this season of sultry winter weather and com...

Good post by Phil Wainewright In my trio of predictions for SaaS in 2007, I've saved the biggest trend till last. The coming year will see a growing acknowledgement that SaaS is just part of a wider move towards Internet-based automated services. This is such an all-embracing trend that it will drive several other sub-trends, each of which can be turned into a prediction of their own. All of these emerging phenomena will be signs of the wider underlying trend taking hold. More acquisitions of SaaS vendors by business service providers. I already highlighted several examples during 2006. The most telling was ADP's acquisition of Employease in August. As I said at the time, this wasn't a case of ADP moving into the SaaS sector: "… it's merely extending into new areas of automated business services — and that's what the on-demand revolution is really about — using software to do a better job of operating automated business services." Proof that this wasn...